Huge initial Rating drop of 403

@mkubecek said in #14:

Wrong. Your initial rating was 1500, just as for (almost) everyone else.

Again, your history shows something completely different. In your first (rated) game you lost 363, in second you gained 132 and in third you lost 134. The first game where your rating changed by 10 or less was your 27th game, i.e. much way later than you claim.

Thank you for supplying me with those details. I have been unable to find them on this site so I had to estimate from memory hence the discrepancies. To be fair its not about tiny exactitude of ratings my question is more about why the huge drop/s in ratings from just one or 2 games. Its not possible to lose 100's of points a game on chess.com so I was curious why it is here

Ignore your rating for the first 10 games or so. The system is trying to understand you so makes lots of adjustments over those games.

@InstinctiveArcher said in #20:

in my last post I asked if someone could direct me to a more detailed analysis of my games because I could only find the profile chart and therefore did not have the correct rating details.
Which part of that did you not understand ?
Or is it that you just prefer to hurl insults and be rude and unhelpful rather than address my question. Clearly you are another who doesn't have a clue about the answer to the question

Are you joking?

Here is the link again with the details to the rating system: https://lichess.org/faq#ratings

And here's the link to all your games, directly available from your profile: https://lichess.org/@/InstinctiveArcher/all

You can simply scroll through all your rated games. Each and every game. Right from the beginning, from your very first game. And none of your games resulted in a 403 point loss.

But did you read the explanations given to you, trying to make sense of the answers and correct your misconceptions? No. You simply came up with more stuff that doesn't match reality.

So, what would be a good way to help you? Really, please suggest what we shall do!

@InstinctiveArcher said in #21:

To be fair its not about tiny exactitude of ratings my question is more about why the huge drop/s in ratings from just one or 2 games.
I wouldn't call it tiny. You said that you gained 8-10 in your first two games and then lost 400 in third. That, if true, would indeed made little sense. In reality, though, the first delta was huge (363), partly because of big initial RD, partly because you lost to an opponent rated ~150 lower, next two were ~130 and then the updates kept calming down as expected and as explained. From my PoV, it's not a tiny difference, it's a principial difference between something that would make no sense and something that makes very good sense and works exactly as intended.

Its not possible to lose 100's of points a game on chess.com so I was curious why it is here
People - and sadly not only those with long experience with chess-com who are new here - often see chess-com as "the standard" and whenever lichess differs in some way, they see it as a problem and request lichess to mimic chess-com. But lichess often has its own reason why it does things differently and often it follows logic rather than marketing reasons.

And this example of yours in fact illustrates this nicely. As I already pointed out, while the 363 points drop seemed huge, it still got you only half way from the initial rating to the rating reflecting your skill at the moment. Now imagine how long it would take to get from 1500 to ~850 if you kept losing only 10-20 rating points per game lost. How many games you would have to lose before establishing the balance where you would be scoring about 50% as you are supposed to. Would that be a more pleasant experience than getting fairly close after few games?

BtW, it's an actual problem observed on chess-com. I've seen a series of "speedrun" videos (something that is not tolerated on lichess, BtW) where the author mentioned that he had to skip quite a few games needed to get from ~700 to ~1000 as those would be quite boring and of little value for the audience. This means that while on chess-com you don't risk losing 360 points of rating in your first game, hurting your feelings (even if probably not as much as having such drop spread over 20 or more games), an IM with natural rating above 2300 has to play (IIRC) 10-20 games on a new account to get from 700 to 1000. Do you really think it's better than how lichess rating system works?

@InstinctiveArcher said in #21:

Its not possible to lose 100's of points a game on chess.com so I was curious why it is here

I don't believe it's that much different on chess-com for newly registered players, they use a Glicko type system as well, as they say here -

https://support.chess.com/en/articles/8566476-how-do-ratings-work-on-chess-com

Specifically:

"Our confidence in your rating affects how much your rating changes. High confidence in your rating means smaller changes, while low confidence can result in bigger changes."

You've probably just forgotten how volatile your rating was when you first registered on chess-com, or maybe your results back then happened not to cause such great swings.

In any case, it will settle down, and you'll have fun playing on this server.

@mkubecek said in #24:

BtW, it's an actual problem observed on chess-com. I've seen a series of "speedrun" videos (something that is not tolerated on lichess, BtW) where the author mentioned that he had to skip quite a few games needed to get from ~700 to ~1000 as those would be quite boring and of little value for the audience.

I might be wrong, but I believe that streamers over on chess-com have to register their alt-accounts officially for the purpose of doing a speedrun. The rating they gain in that way will later be refunded to the opponents (that's true at least for Naroditsky and the Chessbrahs, who are always anxious to point that out), which also explains why their initial RD is so inert.

@Meerkatze said in #25:

I don't believe it's that much different on chess-com for newly registered players, they use a Glicko type system as well, as they say here -

support.chess.com/en/articles/8566476-how-do-ratings-work-on-chess-com

Specifically:

"Our confidence in your rating affects how much your rating changes. High confidence in your rating means smaller changes, while low confidence can result in bigger changes."

You've probably just forgotten how volatile your rating was when you first registered on chess-com, or maybe your results back then happened not to cause such great swings.

In any case, it will settle down, and you'll have fun playing on this server.

Yes I'm sure you are right ...I was just a bit surprised and disappointed at it to be honest but curious more than anything else. I am finding it a long hard slog to raise my rating . Yesterday I broke my rule of not playing another game after a loss due tto carelessness or lack of concentration and lost several games in a row, grrrr I probably should just play more unrated games and worry less about my rating .

Thank you for your explanation . I think the most disappointing and annoying thing for me is having to find out about all this the hard way. There was nothing to warn me of how this site scores games and rates new members games. There really should be a simple introduction to how to set up games and play to limit rating losses and maximise rating points for those completely new to Lichess .
had I known about the points penalty of playing players of lower levels I would have set up my initial games but I didn't even know about setting up games for different criteria like opponent ratings .
@mkubecek said in #24:

I wouldn't call it tiny. You said that you gained 8-10 in your first two games and then lost 400 in third. That, if true, would indeed made little sense. In reality, though, the first delta was huge (363), partly because of big initial RD, partly because you lost to an opponent rated ~150 lower, next two were ~130 and then the updates kept calming down as expected and as explained. From my PoV, it's not a tiny difference, it's a principial difference between something that would make no sense and something that makes very good sense and works exactly as intended.

People - and sadly not only those with long experience with chess-com who are new here - often see chess-com as "the standard" and whenever lichess differs in some way, they see it as a problem and request lichess to mimic chess-com. But lichess often has its own reason why it does things differently and often it follows logic rather than marketing reasons.

And this example of yours in fact illustrates this nicely. As I already pointed out, while the 363 points drop seemed huge, it still got you only half way from the initial rating to the rating reflecting your skill at the moment. Now imagine how long it would take to get from 1500 to ~850 if you kept losing only 10-20 rating points per game lost. How many games you would have to lose before establishing the balance where you would be scoring about 50% as you are supposed to. Would that be a more pleasant experience than getting fairly close after few games?

BtW, it's an actual problem observed on chess-com. I've seen a series of "speedrun" videos (something that is not tolerated on lichess, BtW) where the author mentioned that he had to skip quite a few games needed to get from ~700 to ~1000 as those would be quite boring and of little value for the audience. This means that while on chess-com you don't risk losing 360 points of rating in your first game, hurting your feelings (even if probably not as much as having such drop spread over 20 or more games), an IM with natural rating above 2300 has to play (IIRC) 10-20 games on a new account to get from 700 to 1000. Do you really think it's better than how lichess rating system works?

@InstinctiveArcher said in #28:

There really should be a simple introduction to how to set up games and play to limit rating losses and maximise rating points for those completely new to Lichess .
I believe this is an example of a wrong mindset. Your goal should not be to "maximize rating points". You should just play, do your best and see the rating only as a feedback telling you how are you doing. Keeping your rating high artificially would be of little use and it wouldn't really work long term anyway.

had I known about the points penalty of playing players of lower levels
This shows the "reward/punishment" or "currency" misconception again. It's not a "penalty". The rating system aims to estimate your strength. If a 1500 rated player loses to a 1700 rated one, it's kind of expected and there is no need to adjust the strength estimate much. If they lose to a 1300 rated one, though, it's not expected and it may be a sign that their strength is actually lower, so that the rating system adjusts the rating more. It works the same way also for wins (you gain much more for a win against someone rated 200 higer than against someone 200 lower) and draws (draw against a higher rated opponent increases your rating, draw against lower rated decreases). It's all perfectly natural once you stop thinking about rating as a reward or currency and understand that it's an estimate of your playing strength.

And the updates being bigger when your rating is still considered unreliable (e.g. in the early games) also makes a good sense as then its desirable to converge quickly to the correct value if we are far from it. When your rating is stable and the system is pretty confident about it, a loss against a significantly lower rated opponent (or a win against higher rated) can be just an anomaly so that the rating is not adjusted so much until there are more such results.

I would have set up my initial games
Why? Playing against stronger opponents would only mean you would need more losses to get where you should have ended up.

but I didn't even know about setting up games for different criteria like opponent ratings .
AFAIK the rating range for anonymous challenges only works when your rating is stable. Until then, picking opponents by rating might rather complicate the convergence of your rating to its appropriate value.

@InstinctiveArcher said in #28:

There really should be a simple introduction to how to set up games and play to limit rating losses and maximise rating points

Honestly, I don't think you understand ratings at all.

The rating is a number that says how strong you are. Ideally, you want this to match your playing strength as fast as possible, as this will help to get matching opponents.

There is no way you can prevent this from happening, unless you are heavily violating the TOS, like cheating or deliberately losing. Any way of messing with the rating system is forbidden.

Your rating reflects how strong you are right now. Even if you had won the first 10 games by a miracle, it would have dropped right afterwards to where it is now. You are a complete beginner. The only way to get a higher rating is to becoming a stronger chess player.