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Just a general tip on improving in chess; Always evaluate the material situation by looking at what's on the board, never by what's off it. This extends naturally to properly evaluating exchanges. Ignore the relative merits of the pieces being captured and focus on the relative merits of the pieces left on the board. I agree that if there's a feature that displays the captured pieces it should work properly (even though I think it's a useless feature).

I know about that and don't normally rely on the list of captured pieces in regular games. But, online I mostly play speed chess and play in parallel with other activities in my browser, so getting quick information about the board (or what changed between this turn and the last) is very useful.

On Lichess, you can just click on Create a Game and select the rating range you want, this is pretty much a standard feature of all top chess sites.

A standard feature of all ladder-based competitive systems that I know of (video games, etc), is automatic matchmaking. Chess.com has it and Lichess does not, and that's keeping me from wanting to switch to Lichess.

I don't really want to have to select rating ranges. I don't know what ratings to play against, and I definitely don't want to think about it every time I make a game.

"On Lichess, as far as I can tell, I have to scan the list of games, compare them to my rating (which I can't even see on the main screen, and don't trust at all since it swung +150 points on my first game..), and then pick from the list."

Or you can just host a game and wait for someone to find you?

Indeed. Lichess also does autopairing, so when someone else creates a 10+10 game, you'll get paired without anyone needing to scan the seek list.

I haven't used Lichess much, so I hadn't discovered this. It's not very obvious as far as I can tell. I hope that it would also do matchmaking approximately based on rating?

(Though, as I mentioned, I still don't trust my rating at all since my first ranked win gave me 150 rating points. Chess.com's give closer to 8-20, as I recall, which is much more credible. Specifically, I don't trust that my rating varied by 150 in one game, but the range of ratings I see on the front page is only about 1500-1800.. so it seems as though I just skipped almost the entire range in a single game.)

That's because you have a provisional rating for the first few games (it should show up as 1553? or 1250?). Your rating will swing for the first 15-20 games, at which point you'll see the 8-20 fluctuation.

It's likely that you've played quite a few games on Chess.com already.

I have played a lot on Chess.com. Perhaps they did the same thing and I forgot - not sure. Nevertheless, I'm calling it because I found it offputting when I tried to switch to Lichess.

And get paired over and over again with 1900s trying to up their rating beating 1200s?

No thanks.

1. You can't up your rating beating players 400+ rating below you. The ELO system just do not allow it, you are gonna start winning zero points per win.

2. Playing against stronger players is not that bad, this a way to became a stronger player.

Or, I could just play on chess.com and not have to deal with it.