I must be missing the point but I truly dont understand why people play correspondence chess if everyone is allowed to use a chess engine and it is basically a game of who has the strongest engine. Correspondence chess before the Internet or before strong engines would be chess by mail or email But then people would be able to spend time to review books or manuals and could not consult other people for help. But they still had to spend time to look at the position and use their human brain to determine their move. But nowadays if everyone can consult a chess engine then I would think playing correspondence is a waste of time. But correspondence titled players or with high rated correspondence players defend that it is not a waste of time even though I would think they are probably just sending the move suggested by the engine in modern times. Some correspondence players claim they are helping to advance opening theory because they get to use chess engines so it is not a waste of time and their efforts have value.

When playing online in a long time control or in an over the board (OTB) tournament then at least the game is human vs human because no chess engines are consulted and using an engine would be cheating. But if you win or lose then you do so on your own merits. And if you lose then at least you can learn from your mistakes or lack of understanding. But if you lose in correspondence chess then what did you learn? I guess you learned your engine needs better hardware?

I looked at the list of top rated correspondence chess players in the USCF. A lot of them have correspondence ratings in the 2000s or near 2200 but a lot of their OTB standard ratings are around 1200 or 1300 or even lower. Is that even statistically possible for someone to have a 1200 rated OTB "human" chess understanding and then their correspondence rating is so high?

The commentators keep speaking over each other making it very difficult to understand what's going on, especially during the end game.

The new commentator(james dash) does not gel well at all. I actually used to love the commentary in this channel but it is only getting worse and worse.

There's no alternative either because I don't think saint louis gave camera rights to anyone

Hello, what are your favourite chess platforms to study and play?
After a research on my preferences, here are my favorite tools:

1) Chess Tempo:
- to repeat my opening repertoires with spaced repetition (i somehow prefer this to Chessable)
- to do some blitz tactics (focus on speed>accuracy)
- to do some standard tactics with chessboard (focus on calculation >>> speed)
- to do some finals problems with chessboard
- to do some "guess the move" training
I think i'll buy the Silver soon, just to have more finals per day and see my elo estimate (is it somehow precise?)

2) Chess Woodie:
- to do woodpecker method with tactics (it's so good! I tried to do this with Chessable but ChessWoodie wins by far!)

3) Lichess:
- to play online and do tournaments (both Arena and Swiss)

What do you suggest?

I've enjoyed chess since I was a kid, but I've always felt held back due to my difficulties focusing. I've always been miserably bad at the game but not because I don't understand what I should be doing, but I've had this issue where I (on Chesscom for example) will be dominating an opponent, but make some remarkably idiotic blunder that immediately loses me the game because somehow their knight on f6 that's been there the entire game suddenly became invisible to me. When I was younger I would chock it up to being a rookie mistake or whatever but it's never improved with time, and I feel that all my games play the same way. Either I win in the first 15 moves, or the opponent defends until I inevitably make some sorry mistake and throw the game; obviously this pattern has become extremely boring and my drive to continue playing has been crushed.

Has anyone else with ADHD been successful in improving at chess, especially at competitive level? If anyone here has dealt with it, I would love to know what you've done to resolve or ease any issues with focus you may have had.

Played a game a day but i only get worst how many games do You guys play a day

What's your rating and what is stopping you from reaching your long or short term chess potential? What would you wish existed that would help you immensely in your pursuit or could add to your chess journey in some way?

is it worth reading im 2000 elo and what some books can you give recommande for me to reach 2500

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxWc-f155hI

Game Link: https://www.chess.com/events/2026-clutch-chess-champions-showdown/08/Caruana_Fabiano-Nakamura_Hikaru

I'm an average 1500+ rapid player and improving gradually. How much do I need to master notation? I understand what it all means, but it may take some time for me to process where the pieces are moving in my head. GMs seem to do this so naturally. So if I wanted to reach 2k elo, do I need to master pieces moving using purely notation?

Why did it said i blundered? It was obvious what i was going for (after move 7)

I saw a lecture by GM Ben Finegold on Karpov's positional master class... In which, he showcased many of his games... Karpov's game against Unzicker seemed to be very positionally suffocating for his opponent where he was completely eating up square spaces left and right...

They even called him a Boa Constructor for his playstyle...

By "good at cheating", I mean being able to cheat regularly without getting caught, or at least maintain enough reasonable doubt to avoid sanctions.

So knowing what we know about cheating detection algorithms and focusing on chess play (so basically with telemetry stuff and whatnot excluded), I can come up with a few things they’d have to do in order to be good cheaters:

1. Being able to identify when a move different from the engine top moves can be played safely, to maintain plausible accuracy %
   
2. Being able to understand how "findable" a move seems at a given Elo, to avoid having too many suspicious finds in a given game
   
3. Similarly, being able to estimate how long you should "think" about a move for it to seem natural

There may be other stuff, feel free to share if anyone wants to add to the list.

Now for point #1, I think this doesn’t necessarily require great chessing skill, as long as the cheater plays in a slow enough time control to be able to look at the eval of non-top moves.

Point #3 is based on the assumption that chess platforms monitor time per move (confirmed) while pairing it with some sort of analysis of position complexity/sharpness that would be converted into an expected time per move value (speculative, though seems logical). Given the uncertainty and the fact it’s a corollary of point #2, I’ll just focus on the latter.

I am personally a 2K-ish player online. I don’t think I could play at a 2800 blitz level while understanding my moves enough to cheat plausibly. I’m pretty confident about it because when I watch two FM play blitz or whatever, there’s just too many moves I don’t understand or would have never even envisioned.

I suppose I could theoretically do it at 2200-2300, though. That would be the upper end of opponents I’ve faced and I know there’s not that many moves they play that are just beyond my understanding of chess.

So, where would be the cutoff? I feel like the gap probably can’t be much more than 500. To reformulate the question in title:

How large can the disparity between a cheater’s real strength and their online Elo be while remaining undetected?

Hi, I spent about a year playing the Scotch Game and then switched to Scotch Gambit and played it for maybe six months.

I've had about five weeks off studying due to illness. Now I'm getting back into it and realise that my openings really have become rusty. Feels like I'm having to relearn them to some extent.

So I'm wondering if I should continue with the scotch gambit or use this opportunity to go back to the scotch game.

I'm 1600 on Lichess. As I understand that the scotch game will take you further up the rating ladder.

I do like the scotch gambit so I'm torn between the two.

Appreciate hearing your thoughts.

This is all for a single match. Pgn given below

[Event "Tatva_9 vs Albertito19l"]

[Site "Chess.com"]

[Date "2026-10-28"]

[White "Tatva_9"]

[Black "Albertito19l"]

[Result "1-0"]

[WhiteElo "488"]

[BlackElo "448"]

[TimeControl "600"]

d4 d5 2. Bf4 Nf6 3. e3 Nc6 4. Nc3 e6 5. Bd3 Bb4 6. Ne2 Bxc3+ 7. Nxc3 a6 8.

O-O b5 9. a4 b4 10. Na2 a5 11. c3 Ba6 12. cxb4 Bxd3 13. Qxd3 axb4 14. Qb5 Qd7

1. Nxb4 Ra5 16. Qb7 O-O 17. Nxc6 e5 18. Bxe5 Qe6 19. Nxa5 Nd7 20. Nc6 Rb8 21.

Nxb8 Qb6 22. Qc8+ Nf8 23. Bxc7 Qxb2 24. Nd7 g6 25. Be5 Qe2 26. Qxf8# 1-0

I need actual answers please. As a 400 elo. Chess.com rated me 1250 and stockfish 19 with additional gui chessis - rated me 2410.

Accuracy - Stockfish - gave me - 96.7

Chess.com gave me 89.4 .

​

Link:

https://youtube.com/shorts/_slehY_tfSs?si=wjmJYCV1felcV8DB

Magnus ranks some top players of his own generation, the generation before him and the current one as well.

Current Gen:

Pragg > Sindarov > Alireza > Arjun > Gukesh

Unfortunately Nodirbek and Vincent are missing from this list. Where would you place them.

His Gen:

Caruana > Nepo > Hikaru > Karjakin

Old Gen:

Kasparov > Fischer > Karpov > Vishy > Kramnik

What are your thoughts about these rankings? I feel Karjakin should be above Hikaru for sure considering he was super clutch in important tournaments being the only guy besides Magnus to win World Cup, Candidates, World Rapid and World Blitz as well.

What I am going to write applies to rapid and in lesser extent to blitz.
One shouldn't be surprised when 2700+ classical superGMs struggle to maintain 2700 in Rapid, let alone touch 2800.

The rating pool is structurally deflated. FIDE effectively admitted this in October 2022 when they had to inject points to prevent the top pool from being farmed by rising prodigies. Back then, Pragg was 2687 in Classical but an absurd 1927 in Rapid. Gukesh had a similar rating situation.

Why does this happen? Because outside the elite, almost nobody plays rapid that often. Juniors play dozens of classical gains a year, gain tons of Elo in classical, but their rapid rating remains frozen (or almost frozen) from when they were younger. When they finally play more rapid, they act as massive rating sinks. They draw or beat top 100 and thus they drain points out of the top tier.

What did FIDE do in Oct 2022? They bumped lagging rapid ratings up to Classical minus 100. There is de-facto a gap (around 100 rating points) since rating points don't materialize out of nowhere in a low activity pool. There are few mechanisms, like k-factor mismatch and others, to introduce points in the pool, but that happens in classical too, so the gap stay.

Elo does not care about "move quality" or engine accuracy. It cares strictly about rating differences. In classical, a 2820 GM plays a dense field of 2760s, a +2 score holds the rating. But in rapid, where the next tier is deflated down to 2680–2700, that same 2820 player has to score 75%+ just not to lose points. In general it wouldn't matter if a pool is deflated compared to another, as long as the rating differences hold, but the community uses classical rating as a strong reference.

Because FIDE doesn't repeat point injections, the cycle continues: new juniors improve, their rapid ratings lag, and the top 100 gets eroded all over again. Active top players lose rating to this deflation, while inactive players tend to preserve or go down much less than the active ones.

(I am saying this for some years already in various comments here and there, but I never formalized it with some data)

Then some data. Source: the October 2026 list, where I considered only the top 100 relatively young players (born 2000 or later). Why younger players? Because those show the rating gap problem the best.

October 2026 FIDE List pick

This is a common position I am frequently in. It's always e3g5. I don't get why they do that. I'm not castling in that direction, obviously with my pawns pushed so much... So forcing an attack on that side of the board is pointless.

They also frequently get their Queen pinned during this opening. Again I don't know why, but they never see it.

Link to full game for anyone who wants to look: https://lichess.org/game/NBaphvprxX68