Chess.com Pool Play

I've been playing on chess.com since it's early years and have loved all of the new features we continually see as the site expands and grows. One feature I have been waiting for since the site's inception which has been incredibly popular elsewhere is the concept of pool play.

For anyone unfamiliar with the concept, it is pretty straight forward. You have independent ratings associated with specific time controls, where you are randomly paired against players of similar rating in a "pool" of which you have no control over who you are matched against. For example you have a 1-minute pool for bullet players, a 3-minute pool for blitz players and possibly 5 and 15-minute pools for players that enjoy slower time controls all with independent ratings. Pool play also introduces the concept that once you are paired vs someone, you are not able to abort the game unless both players agree to abort it.

The reasons players gravitate towards this system has also been pretty clearly established.

1) This eliminates possibility of playing the same player over and over again, be it someone who is a friend or someone you stylistically just match up well against to gain a high win % or boost rating.

2) This adds an extra measure to those who like to pick and choose their opponents, or wait until they get white to play a game by disallowing aborts unless both players agree.

3) This almost completely eliminates the ability of artificially boosting rating by playing shared accounts, since you can't choose your opponent and also establishes what most view as the most legitimate rating.

4) This establishes a true rating strength of that given time control. A 1-minute rating or 3-minute rating means all players who have ratings within them that correlate directly to strength in playing 1 and 3 minutes chess. You don't have circumstances where ratings completely fluctuate depending on if the player is playing 2/1 bullet, 1/0 bullet or 30 or even 10 second bullet of which all count towards the same bullet rating.

5) People tend to love the randomness factor and get to play a variety of opponents that sometimes they normally may not be able to play.

6) It's quick and easy! You don't have to spend time seeking a specific time control within a certain rating range or go around challenging individuals one at a time to get a game. You just join the pool(s) until you randomly get matched vs a player of similar rating. Functionally how the pool is supposed to work is for the first moments of time attempt to match you against someone very close in rating (maybe +-50 pts) then as more time elapses widens the range in which you get paired.

That said, in the past places pools have been implemented - they've shown incredible popularity. I can only imagine the same happening if they were implemented on chess.com.

 I thought that was basically done here on Chess.com except that there aren't separate ratings for each and every time control.  There are only three live chess ratings.  I guess I agreed that having 20 live chess ratings would be too much.

They have a "seek" feature that matches 2 people with the same filters on their seek (or allows people to manually go in and see open seeks and accept games) but this is not the same concept as pools. Pools match you completely randomly against other players near your rating and don't give you the option of filtering your seek to a certain rating range, or choosing a specific opponent, or aborting the game on move if you either don't like your opponent or get black. That's why people tend to like them so much and generally accept your rating within them more accurately reflects your real strength. Imaging going to a tournament and being able to pick and choose what rating of players you get paired with, having the ability to play the same opponent 10 games in a row, or deciding to "skip" the game if you don't like your color or who you are matched against? It's awesome to have the ability to do that if you want to play a friend or play a match vs someone, but there also needs to be another rating category where you don't get to pick and choose.

That can be done. There are tournaments with rating based sections. It's even allowed to have rated matches with multiple games against the same player in official OTB rated play.

The site also limits how often someone can abort. If it's done too often they lose the ability to do it.

Also, it's very likely most people don't touch the range settings, so what you're describing is essentially in effect, and those that don't meet your criteria, aren't significantly impacting ratings on the whole. Some individual accounts may be over/under rated but on average, that isn't likely the case