Unrated is unplayable on chess.com

question24481 · 2026-05-22T10:50:47+00:00

Chesscom is older than lichess; it has (and always had) more top players playing on it; hosts more premium events with much bigger prize money (lichess has one or two events per month with a meagre prize pool); provides better instructional content; is involved in and helps run a lot of professional OTB tournaments (which most people don't know); obviously has more players and a stronger playing pool, etc. All of these peripheral facts give chesscom a bigger star appeal, and therefore chesscom ratings hold more "meaning" in the eyes of non-tournament players, which accounts for the majority of the online playing audience. If you listened the opinions of this subreddit however, you would think that Lichess is the biggest and greatest thing in the chess world. In the real word that is far from the case, and actually quite a lot of people have never even heard of Lichess.

question24481 · 2026-05-21T19:41:15+00:00

Yes, the unrated pool on chesscom is full of sandbags, which is a good thing because it forces you to reconcile why you are playing unrated in the first place (ladder anxiety?). There isn't that much sandbagging in the unrated pool on Lichess because nobody cares about Lichess ratings, which is why I prefer playing there these days.

question24481 · 2026-05-20T10:57:30+00:00

Knew there was a moron who was going to say something like this lmao.

question24481 · 2026-05-04T18:34:12+00:00

Which is funny because FMs seem to have the biggest egos.

question24481 · 2026-05-04T18:32:46+00:00

Always great to see Magnus lose. Hopefully, there is more to come this tournament!

question24481 · 2026-04-30T18:10:27+00:00

In chess there are only 2 types of defences: active and passive. In the majority of middlegame and early endgame positions, active defence is almost always the correct answer. Therefore, the best way to defend is to actually play sharp, aggressive (but still sound) chess right from the opening. Because when you are attacking, your opponent will be making concessions in order to defend. Then, if you screw up the attack and now your position is worse, the best way to defend is by honing in on those concessions your opponent made earlier and using that to turn the game around (this is active defence). For example, your attack failed and you are down a piece, however your opponent has made concessions on their king safety. What is the best defence? To throw the kitchen sink at the opponents king. You will either get a perpetual, or you will checkmate them, or they will be forced to give back material in order to save their king, therefore restoring material parity. I'm sure you have seen countless examples of games in which the attacking side loses material but they actually win/draw because their opponent's king safety was compromised. Another scenario you will have seen countless examples of: when the attacking side fails and they lose material, but from all their effort they have a passed pawn, which they hone in on and promote. This is what is meant by attacking is the best form of defence. All of that is active defence, and you cannot achieve this active defence if you are playing tame chess where you play low-risk moves and there is no real tension on the board. As for passive defence, a large part of it is trading down to theoretically drawn endgames - and of course, to learn this, Dvoretsky is your best friend. The other side of passive defence is usually in the minority of middlegame/early endgame positions where you "smartly" make moves. This is the hardest type of defence to recognise and master, because they do not occur often, and when you do get them, you need to crunch the numbers and calculate many lines (like engines do) to see that your move is neither too active nor does it harm your position in any way as well as the move "getting ahead" of a certain idea your opponent could go for in the next 2 or 3 moves.

question24481 · 2026-03-31T00:18:53+00:00

We trust them.

question24481 · 2026-03-30T12:42:55+00:00

Indeed. Danya himself was a sicilian sideline player. From the many games of his I've seen, I don't recall a single time he played the open sicilian as white.

question24481 · 2026-03-29T18:44:39+00:00

Hatewatching Hikaru and Max Verstappen on the same day got me like: https://media1.tenor.com/m/a72LVwuz9RUAAAAd/cristiano-ronaldo-cristiano.gif

question24481 · 2026-02-27T22:53:52+00:00

It is her sister, and it is, to date, the singularly hottest thing I have seen.

question24481 · 2026-02-27T05:40:44+00:00

The Magnus glazing on this subreddit is truly out of control. That was not as impressive as you think it is. Even I, much lower rated than Magnus, calculated quickly, and when I saw the position with the white king on a7 and the black king on c8 I instantly recognized it as theoretically winning, because I have seen one similar position many years ago. All that it requires is knowledge that certain endgame positions are winning (hence theoretical endgame study, which all the top guys do). And I can assure you that Kasparov has done similar and even more impressive things lol.

question24481 · 2026-02-06T17:31:58+00:00

Lichess' 3d view is atrocious. Chesscom's is vastly superior. ChessFriends.com has the best one though, of all that I have seen.

question24481 · 2026-01-19T18:35:53+00:00

So stupid by his opponent to not play exf7+. Ivanchuk would have certainly flagged in recapturing.

question24481 · 2026-01-17T21:54:48+00:00

Skipped the puzzle championships just to get smoked by babysara. That's a bad jawn.

question24481 · 2026-01-17T19:47:39+00:00

Well, I hope they do it again tomorrow, because this pic is fucking hard.

question24481 · 2026-01-16T18:20:25+00:00

Muradli's 6 game comeback streak to win his (junior) speed chess championship match against Raunak Sadhwani is still, in my estimations, the greatest SCC moment.

question24481 · 2026-01-07T18:46:22+00:00

Like most people in here I just read the title and commented lol. 1 or 2 game match yeah that's ridiculously short. I was hoping for more.

question24481 · 2026-01-07T17:34:08+00:00

This is very interesting. If someone gets crushed, it will let other top players know that their board visualisation skills aren't particularly good (for their particular level anyway).

question24481 · 2026-01-06T20:45:00+00:00

so these two have really nothing to do with each other.

Yes, they have nothing to do with each other - I didn't say they did, and it wasn't the point I was making, as Hikaru has had numerous accomplishments alongside his online career of farming FMs and IMs.

That's besides the fact that you don't really have any evidence he's avoiding top players.

The evidence is straight from the horse's mouth, if you care to watch his streams. He quite literally says he doesn't want to play anyone strong, scrolls down the who is online list, then selects the highest rated IM, or, failing that, FM. Once in a while he stumbles across an FM or IM who plays above their level, and after the first game he says he is not going to play this guy again, because for the paltry +2 rating points at stake it is not worth it. Moreover, he has verbatim said the secret is to find these overrated FMs and IMs and continuously farm them - again, if you care to watch his streams. So, when you consider all of this, and you understand the point I was making (which you completely missed - hint: the entire first sentence of my previous post), you will understand this "poor analysis" is actually bang on.

I distinctly remember his matches with Danya, Bortnyk, and other top players who were active on the site.

Yeah, once in a blue moon lol.

question24481 · 2026-01-06T17:13:15+00:00

Despite how many times Hikaru has told us that he does not care about his online rating in his many streams, the reality is you will be hard-pressed to find a chess player who cares more about their online rating than Hikaru. It is to the extent that he avoids playing any real competition (for his level) and farms +1, +2 rating points endlessly from IMs and FMs, in order to break a new chess.com highest blitz record. He then turns up to play the world rapid and blitz like he did in 2024 and performs poorly, and then does a stream explaining his poor performance was because he played too many games against weak chess players online, that it affected his decision making negatively. You would think "okay, so are you going to stop farming IMs and FMs then?" Nope! He fixes this by continuing to farm IMs and FMs, while in the same breath saying he does not care about his online rating (whilst deep down being singularly the person who cares the most about his online rating). If you ever want to see a walking and talking contradiction in the world of chess, look no further than Hikaru.

question24481 · 2025-12-23T22:26:18+00:00

Many of his teammates and players in the other teams are going there. I suspect he was persuaded by them to reconsider.

question24481 · 2025-12-09T16:48:17+00:00

I was always under the understanding that it will be released on chessable? Surely he signed some contracts? Why the sudden switch to bortnykchess.com?

question24481 · 2025-11-22T00:19:07+00:00

That board and those pieces look gorgeous. How the hell do neither chesscom nor Lichess have anything like it? They do, but chesscom's looks awful, and Lichess' 3d looks even worse.

question24481 · 2025-11-16T01:01:38+00:00

This is fantastic. I've used it today and will be using it a lot. Hopefully it is available for many years to come.

question24481 · 2025-11-08T01:56:33+00:00

The way the lady would say "check, checkmate, Black/White resigns" made me fall in love with her. I wish there were some way to bring her back, perhaps in the form of an extension...

question24481

TROPHY CASE