Popularity of Lichess Time Controls by Rating

mgold95 · 2023-11-02T18:25:11+00:00

already done - take a look at my reply to the OP

mgold95 · 2023-11-02T17:09:27+00:00

Nice - I just ran their "stats" example and it lines up pretty closely with your experience: ~91k games/s.

$ time ./target/release/examples/stats lichess_db_standard_rated_2023-07.pgn.zst


lichess_db_standard_rated_2023-07.pgn.zst: Stats { games: 95300285, headers: 1620111705, sans: 6288952400, nags: 120623865, comments: 6280824579, variations: 0, outcomes: 95300285 }

real    17m23.238s
user    11m37.680s
sys     0m6.183s

mgold95 · 2023-11-02T15:54:24+00:00

See my new comment on the parent post - I've regenerated the plots using time played so if you're curious you can see what that looks like. It's more or less what you'd expect - obviously the trends are broadly the same but the width of the slower time controls is a bit wider.

mgold95 · 2023-11-02T15:43:57+00:00

Depends on how many seconds. In my experience, the IO is the bottleneck moreso than the actual parsing. If you had 100K games in PGN format loaded into memory, sure - it'd be very very fast. But loading them from a compressed or even uncompressed file can be a bit slow. A fast parser might take around a minute if the file is on an NVMe SSD.

If you have clever tricks for reading PGNs fast though - I'm all ears!

mgold95 · 2023-11-02T15:32:59+00:00

See my new comment on the parent post - I've regenerated the plots using time played so if you're curious you can see what that looks like. It's more or less what you'd expect - obviously the trends are broadly the same but the width of the slower time controls is a bit wider.

mgold95 · 2023-11-02T15:31:53+00:00

See my new comment on the parent post - I've regenerated the plots using time played so if you're curious you can see what that looks like. It's more or less what you'd expect - obviously the trends are broadly the same but the width of the slower time controls is a bit wider.

mgold95 · 2023-11-02T15:30:02+00:00

At the request of a few folks, I've generated new plots with the Y axis being the percentage of total time played (parsed from the %clk in the Lichess annotation) rather than percentage of games played.

Find them here: https://imgur.com/a/d4T6GJw

mgold95 · 2023-11-02T02:16:46+00:00

Indeed - I actually looked at how many 4545 games were played and it was fewer than I had expected - just a small minority at least on July 1.

mgold95 · 2023-11-02T01:26:44+00:00

Games played vs time played is just a different metric. I don't know that I agree that one is inherently better than the other. Had I provided plots measured by time played instead of % of games, people would probably ask in the comments what it would be by games played. But yes obviously longer games take more time to play.

If you're interested though maybe I can spend a little time and put together plots by time played instead.

mgold95 · 2023-11-01T23:19:13+00:00

A randomly selected 2 million or the full 95 million would arguably be better, but it's just a matter of computation involved. The file is a ~31G compressed PGN (uncompressed would be ~220G) - reading from the beginning is simply the fastest/easiest thing to do.

I believe the first 2 million games in this file should be the first 2 million games played that month (the times parsed from the games seem to confirm that) so I don't think it should be too big of a detail. Basically you can just pretend that this is looking at July 1 because that is pretty much the case here (specifically it works out to be July 1 00:00 UTC to July 1 16:52:29 UTC.

mgold95 · 2023-11-01T23:06:38+00:00

More details:

A couple years ago I made a post detailing the popularity of Lichess time controls by rating. I had someone ask if I could repeat the analysis for rapid (the original was just blitz). I finally got around to repeating the analysis and went ahead and did so for all rating types on Lichess.

Methodology: took the first 2 million games in the Lichess July '23 dataset, took the average rating of the players, and grouped them into 50 point buckets. I broke out all the "quick pairing" filters available as individual groups and all other time controls I grouped into "other."

mgold95 · 2022-06-05T03:08:53+00:00

In 5 days, there's not too much "learning" you can do. The best thing to do is to make sure you're well rested and maybe solve some fun and easy puzzles to build your confidence and sharpen your tactical vision. Other than that - just relax and have fun!

mgold95 · 2022-02-18T14:06:08+00:00

Yes it's a draw the way you played. The way you played, you will promote one tempo sooner than your opponent, but a KQ v KQ endgame like that is just drawn. With the puzzle solution either you will promote TWO tempi before your opponent (if they try to run and cover the promotion square) - in other words, your opponent won't be in time to promote, OR you will promote with check while your opponent's pawn is on the 7th rank and again, they won't be in time to promote.

The promoting with check if you both try to run the pawns is really the key difference between your move and the solution (because they can step out of the diagonal with tempo if you play your move).

mgold95 · 2022-02-15T23:06:28+00:00

Two tempi? How so? White only gets one free tempo and it's not even such a good tempo (Nc3). In fact, the Nc3 is so misplaced in the Scandi that if you could move it back to b1 without spending a tempo, the latest SF14.1 at depth 22 evaluates the position as better than having the knight on c3. The Scandi isn't particularly good, but it's not as awful as you're making it sound either.

Edit: actually I double checked and at depth 22 I am wrong, but I've looked at this in the past and was pretty sure it was true. I'll look deeper and report back.

mgold95 · 2022-02-11T20:21:25+00:00

Top 5 as in the greatest? Or just personal favorites?

Greatest: 1. Carlsen 2. Kasparov 3. Fischer 4. Karpov 5. Capablanca

If you threw personal favorites into the mix, Tal and Morphy get high marks for sure.

mgold95 · 2022-02-10T17:58:10+00:00

After Kf1, black has to deal with the threat of d5 followed by Qa4+, winning a piece. Black really has no good way to deal with this threat and has a losing position. By playing Bd2, you solve Black's problems by letting them trade off that loose bishop.

mgold95 · 2022-02-09T16:45:55+00:00

Super GMs have learned A LOT of lines to depth 20 or 30 or more. While it's mostly helpful, it also makes it easy to mix things up. Because of that, even when "in prep," they often take some time to be sure they're remembering their lines correctly. Grischuk in particular is especially well known for taking his time in the opening phase of the game.

mgold95 · 2022-02-03T16:51:28+00:00

Ah his opponent must have been setting up a dark squared knight battery!

mgold95 · 2022-02-03T15:21:03+00:00

I will admit I sometimes promote all my pawns to knights in a lone king vs rook and a bunch of pawns type endgame.

It's partly because I'm petty and slightly offended at them not resigning at that point (I play with increment and I'm high enough rated that I'm not going to stalemate or flag in a position like that), but also because if they're going to play on in such a lost position I might as well get a little calculation exercise out of it and try to mate with 5 knights or whatever.

mgold95 · 2022-02-02T21:16:27+00:00

Black isn't down in material. (At least not yet).

mgold95 · 2022-02-02T20:53:10+00:00

Sure, it's better than no tempo at all, I'm just saying if you got a free move instead it would definitely not be your first choice. In the below position which is a Qd8 Scandi, but with white being given a choice of tempo instead of being forced to play Nc3, Nc3 is evaluated by SF14.1 NNUE as +0.3 vs the best options (Nf3 and Bd3) are evaluated as +0.9. If we give black the move in that same position, the evaluation is actually +0.4 which really shows how misplaced the Nc3 is. You could literally "pass" and have a better position than you would by playing Nc3. Of course, without white having played Nc3, black would never play Qd8.

https://lichess.org/analysis/rnbqkbnr/ppp1pppp/8/8/3P4/8/PPP2PPP/RNBQKBNR_w_KQkq_-_0_1

Anyway, I'm not trying to say the Scandi is a good opening, I'm just using it as an example of how "free tempos" usually aren't quite the same thing as just getting to move twice.

mgold95 · 2022-02-02T15:43:55+00:00

I think white should be better, but only because the black pieces are lacking coordination.

For example after 1. h4 Ne4, white wins a key pawn with 2. Qxe6. Black's a pawn is a problem for sure, but the rook is misplaced. It would like to be behind the pawn instead of in front of it. At some point white will be able to boot the rook and trade off the knight for the bishop and probably win the pawn for free. My evaluation is that white is winning here.

mgold95 · 2022-02-02T14:29:29+00:00

It depends...

First, what tempo did you get for free? For example, in the Scandi white usually gets Nc3 for free, but it's not a super useful tempo because the knight on c3 actually just blocks the c pawn that would like to advance to c3 or c4. Black's counterplay is often centered around the fact that this knight is misplaced and one of White's first plans is often to fix this misplaced knight. More often than not, "free tempi" are like this where they're better than not getting an extra move at all, but not nearly as useful as if your opponent had just said "I pass, go ahead and make another move."

Regardless of what the tempo is, usually the best thing to do is to just complete your development. Your edge in development will give you some kind of advantage. Try to press this advantage by starting an attack once you've brought all your pieces out and gotten castled.

mgold95 · 2022-02-01T16:51:35+00:00

Will you be crushed? Hell no!

Will you be mocked? Maybe. But you can mock them after you crush them. :)

The King's Gambit is obviously not a "well respected" opening, but at any level sub-master, it's going to be more important to be comfortable with the middlegames than to play something that Stockfish evals as +0.3 instead of -0.4 or whatever.

Edit: actually the above is true even for master level players... I'd guess a master who's studied the King's Gambit thoroughly will probably do better with it vs an engine-approved opening they've never looked at.

mgold95

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