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Comment by adamisom | Hacker News Reader

I like the points about studying in this article but its overall point is trash. Ratings across different websites are not the same thing!

2000 lichess is actually more like 1800 chess.com. I would know because that is my playing strength on both and because reddit.com/r/chess has literally dozens of posts of people comparing their lichess and chess.com ratings (my impression is the average difference is ~200). That subreddit also has dozens of posts of people 'reaching 2000' on lichess. It corresponds to about 95th percentile on lichess blitz, just as 1800 corresponds to about 95th percentile on chess.com blitz. So literally anyone switching platforms would 'improve their rating'.

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The headline was 2000 lichess, how can that not be more clear? It is not hard to find out lichess uses a different method of calculating ratings and thus their numbers will my nature be different. 2000 is still impressive even if it isn't nearly as good FIDE 2000.

The entire article is about the author having stalled at 1800 before lichess but then breaking 2000 when switching to lichess. So if chess.com 1800 = lichess 200, then the author did not improve and all his notes about learning are useless.

I read it as: Lichess came out with a good engine for analyzing games, which helped get to 2000. They were on Lichess the whole time.

Nobody reads. The dude had a 10 year hiatus. Lichess didn't exist at the time. Most chess websites have had ratings roughly analogous to either USCF or to FIDE but lichess is the notorious exception.

1) why would you think it wasn't clear to me? 2) this isn't about finding out if lichess has a different method of calculating ratings 3) furthermore, their different method for calculating ratings probably isn't why their ratings are higher 4) ratings are arbitrary, unless they aren't--I could make my own website and give everyone a rating of 3000 and there would be nothing as impressive about it 5) the whole point of author's article is to demonstrate he improved at chess and he probably didn't, he just adjusted to the new platform until his rating rose to reflect his strength. He's still pretty good, ~95th%ile

Collecting this data and making a few nice correlation graph looks like a nice project for a blog post I'd like to read.

Here's some data collection: https://chessgoals.com/rating-comparison/

Here's a blog post along the same line from a few years ago: https://www.chess.com/article/view/chesscom-rating-compariso...

You fix your misunderstanding, look at the picture at the top of the article.

I see the graph. When I first read it, I instantly inferred from that graph that they simply were adjusting to the lichess platform because (1) everybody starts with a rating of 1200 on chess.com and 1500 on lichess--the two biggest chess playing sites by far--so you naturally 'raise your rating' if you're simply better than the website's guess at average and (2) it just takes a bit of adjustment to a new platform.

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