Regarding Tactics Trainer

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Avatar of monkeyl10

Okay, this is starting to drive me a bit off the wall. I understand chess.com might be trying to add a few new puzzles and they also can't eliminate all bad puzzles, but my complaint has to do with the puzzle rating system. I can see that the ratings essentially don't change at all based on whether or not you get it right or wrong: and this is evident by two factors:

1. You have people posting the puzzle ratings from 6 months ago and it's still the same

2. And this is the part that annoys me: you have impossibly difficult puzzles that are severely underrated.

There is also another indicator of this,
If a puzzle has a 0.3% pass rate, it's probably underrated. This example of a puzzle is 100% not
supposed to be worthy of a 2000 rating, and it's obvious that the pass rate is so low because the rating just isn't updating based on how often players miss/solve the tactic, which is just, simply put, stupid. Do chess.com puzzles just stay at a constant rating? This constant underrating of a tactic makes the trainer insanely annoying: at the moment, I am 2550, and missing a puzzle rated this low destroys my rating, and there is nothing I can do about it. If the pass rate is under 1%, it's probably extremely underrated, yet the current rating doesn't go up 600-700 points... instead, it just stays there and you keep missing these and your rating continues to drop.

So in the end, I am asking for an explanation. Why are the puzzles like this? A few is understandable but I am getting one practically 30% of the time, which is outrageous. Is there a reason? I know for a fact the TT puzzle ratings used to update themselves based on player accuracy. Why does it not do so now?

Avatar of Squwuirrel

I concur. 

Avatar of Squwuirrel

Something really needs to be done about this. 

Avatar of coach_craig

Well written and well argued 

Avatar of DubiousChess

I'm at your same rating, and have the same issue. And it gets worse every day, now over half the problems I get have pass rates anywhere from 0.1% to 3%. Even they are all listed as anywhere from 2200 to 2600 rated, based on those pass rates they should be 3000 to 5000. At this point I've pretty much given up on the tactics trainer, since even if overnight I suddenly became GM strength, my rating would be unchanged since there's essentially a wall at 2600 where only an engine could get 50% of problems correct.

Avatar of monkeyl10

Of 369 people, not a single person has ever solved this tactic...

Avatar of shirazu0

Occasionally you also get random tactics where the rating is ridiculously low for the level, although you never see anything crazy like pass rates in the 80s. Overall this makes training and puzzle rush really unfun.

Avatar of monkeyl10

Honestly, I don't think this is as much of an issue with puzzle rush; there are underrated problems but none of them are severely difficult. Once you move on to higher-rated puzzles, this is increasingly an issue, and I agree, it makes it extremely unfair and not fun.