I really enjoy solving Lichess puzzles. They're fun to do in my downtime, before bed or something, and I think they've helped me a lot as a tactical player, certainly a big part of how I've gone from around a 1200 rating to almost 1700 over the past year and a half or so. To date I've done more than 12,000 puzzles. However, I seem to be getting to a point where a lot of the puzzles that I get are below my rating. This means that many puzzles I solve will get me 2-5 points, whereas when I miss one move I can end up losing around 20 points. This is frustrating because I can solve 4 out of 5 puzzles sometimes, but still lose rating points.
It's kind of like playing normal games against players rated 200-300 points below you- you win most, get very few points for it, but if you make a blunder and lose one, you really get punished for it. When I play quick pairing games in 1+0 chess for example, I always get paired with players that are within about 100 points of my rating, normally even closer, which is great because a win gets me between 5-7 points, and a loss loses me 5-7 points, so if I play 100 games and win 60, my rating will almost always increase.
Why isn't this the case with puzzles too? For example, yesterday I "won" 124 puzzles and "lost" 90, but my rating went down by 21 points. I don't know exactly how puzzles are assigned or how they get their ratings, but it's really frustrating to be on a 7 or 8 puzzle winning streak and then lose a couple puzzles and be back to where I started on points. I know I should be beating the lower-rated puzzles of course, but blunders happen!
I would like to know more about how it works the Lichess problems system because I feel it works different from other sites. I agree that sometimes can be frustating because usually solved problems give little and failed ones take a lot, but I think it's intended to keep ratings more stable and avoid ridiculous ratings like you can see in other places.
From my experience there is a wide rating range of problems selected (from about -300 to +200 points) and I get punished quite often when failing problems well below my rating. But this prevents my rating inflation.
I find the selection of problems excellent, usually it's not enough to just guess the first move, you have to follow all way down and there are no alternate solutions.
What I feel might be adjusted is the problem's ratings, quite often I find challenging problems that are +200 points lower than my rating. I understand that these ratings are not ELO nor GLICKO and are calculated from player's wins and fails, but still feel bit weird.
Hmm that does make sense, to be honest I don't really play on other sites so I don't know how inflated the ratings can get. But it is certainly annoying when you invest that much time in improving and you can see gains in points in your ratings in blitz, classic, rapid, bullet, etc. but my puzzle rating just stays the same or goes down. I've also noticed that puzzles rated 100-200 points higher than me will still give me -10 or -11 when I fail. I just feel like the system doesn't show you accurately whether or not you're improving at puzzles in general, or whether you need work, and perhaps keeping puzzles closer to your current rating would help you measure your growth as a puzzle solver.
I've been through times when I solved around 400 to 500 puzzles a day.
However, the best way to take advantage of these puzzles and advance with them is by trying to solve them with patience, precision and calculation. That takes time.
So calm down, without rushing, don't move by intuition.
It is true that there are streaks in which it seems that the puzzles presented gives you few points, but if you fail you lose a lot. However, these streaks are not very long and you are presented with puzzles that give you more than 20 points if you get them right.
@Tribe11 I was speaking specially about chessdotcom where the top 3 is +20000 rating and there are over thousand players rated +3000. As @supertorpe says best way to tackle Lichess puzzles is slow down. Play few problems every day and do not make your move until you have seen all the line, just like on the board situation. After all, taking long time to solve each problem seems not to penalise (unlike he other approach).
I perfectly understand your feelings and I think would be great if Lichess implements unrated puzzles option for use these moments were you want to do some quick tactics without getting stuck in a particulary hard one.
By the way, congrats for your https://github.com/supertorpe/chessendgametraining app @supertorpe looks cool way to practice finals! ;)
@dipblu thank you very much, I hope you find it useful!
Hi guys!
@Tribe11 can it be that in puzzles they can allow a bigger spread than for games? For games both players should be satisfied on average but if you play somebody several standard deviations lower too often you will be irritated. So it makes sense for the pairing system to mostly pair within a couple standard deviations?
For puzzles it might be different so you get paired to a puzzle that is much weaker or much stronger because there is no difference to the other side. But that way you get to see the hard end of the puzzles but also consolidate the basics?
I would also be interested what's the setup and rationale for the settings of the pairing system of different variants of the game. On my side I was recently interested why I'm gaining +/-5 in typical games in Blitz while a year ago it was +/-12 . This is because lichess uses an adaptable variant of ELO and it's actually pretty cool https://lichess.org/forum/general-chess-discussion/glicko-2-rating-system-vs-elo-rating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glicko_rating_system But there's also other parameters eg how fast it decays from say 12 to 5 etc
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