r/chess Weekly Discussion Thread

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Caruana rapid have been a disaster for the past 12 month and seems no one is talking about it. He lost nearly 100 elo.

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

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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.

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...

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

As he wrote on Facebook:
Finalising the update of my 2012 book CALCULATION these days. We have updated it a number of times, and added a chapter along the way. But this is the first time I have gone over every example and every sentence in the book and rewritten it from scratch. For this reason, the need edition will be blue, not yellow, so people will know it is the new edition. It will however be released with the same ISBN as the yellow edition - because of SEO and other things to do with how Amazon and the big chains work.
Going to print in 2-3 weeks. Will ship in January, is my expectation. 30%+ of the examples are new.

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?

Game Link: https://www.chess.com/events/2026-clutch-chess-champions-showdown/06/Sindarov_Javokhir-Nakamura_Hikaru

And more bullet compared to blitz. Do they truly play so little rapid online, or do they usually have an alternative anonymous account that they play rapid on?

If they genuinely play so little rapid games, then what is the reason?

For instance, an acquaintance of mine who is a WFM, has played over 62,000 games on her account that are probably over 97-98% bullet and in total has played 13 rapid games. I doubt she has an alternative account because she plays about 50 to 100+ bullet games a day (sometimes over 150) post-work (she works a full-time job as a doctor).

Game link: https://www.chess.com/events/2026-clutch-chess-champions-showdown/03/Nakamura_Hikaru-Praggnanandhaa_R

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?