I was locked out of the variants server during the middle of the 2025 Fog of War Chess Championship qualifier tournament:

I am very disappointed in Chess.com for not fixing their unfair broken pairing rule that pairs players based on having a similar rating rather than based on a similar tournament rank. It has been several months and Chess.com hasn’t done anything about it.

Fog of War Chess: Rank #2 (2317 blitz) (~April 2023)

Spell Chess: Rank #3 (2533 blitz) (August 3, 2025)

My Retrospective on the 2025 Spell Chess Championship Qualifiers:

https://www.chess.com/blog/LongTermFuture/retrospective-on-the-spell-chess-championship-qualifiers

TL;DR: Chess.com blundered by using an unfair pairing system and I was one of the players who was negatively affected.

I hosted a 24-hours-per-move Team Spell Chess game with 36 players in June-July 2025: https://wjkiely.github.io/spell-chess/teamgame.html

I won 5th place (and a $150 prize) in the 2024 Chess.com Fog of War Chess Championship on October 18th, 2024.

You can view my games and the winner's games from the tournament here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qUGvCS5g3XtReW10HVHTF0e-hrUe8UrAvXr8sOJFyFY/edit?gid=0#gid=0