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Comment by dvirsky | Hacker News Reader

One thing not mentioned here is the players. Chess.com is much more beginner heavy. I'm a pretty bad player, and while on lichess I'm slightly below the median, on chess.com I'm around 80th percentile. It also feels like the common or average playing style is a bit different, more basic and aggressive on chess.com. Here we go, another Fried Liver!

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Would you mind sharing your rating on each?

I've found 600-level games on Chess.com much harder to win than 1000-level games on Lichess.

Chess.com and lichess use different rating systems, and give different ratings to new players. Chess.com ratings end up being consistently lower, but that doesn't correspond to you being in a lower percentile of players on chess.com (what parent was talking about).

For reference though, I'm 2000 lichess rapid, and 1700 chess.com rapid. I use chess.com as my "I'm not going to play well right now" site so it's a bit worse because of that, but mostly it's because of the difference in rating system/pool.

I'm 1500 lichess and approx 1250 chess.com

50th percentile lichess and 80th percentile chess.com

The Elo distribution is really different between them. I'm hovering around 1500 on lichess Blitz and 1100 on chess.com Blitz. I would say 1000 on lichess ~= 500-600 on chess.com.

who cares about absolute rating? no matter what the rating of your opponent is, it's all about the _difference_ between theirs and yours. It would have been nice to just have 1 number and one unit but it isn't. Now you have x on Fide, y on lichess, z on USCF, t on chess.com and w on fics. (for me it's 2000 Fide, 2300 Lichess, no USCF, no chess.com and 1850 on fics )

Well, actually I've even found 600-level games on Chess.com to be harder than 900-level games.

Obviously I've improved. But I wonder if the many of the very low ratings on Chess.com are just due to people making terrible blunders in otherwise pretty solid games.

I've also noticed that there isn't a lot of difference. You get horrible blunders from higher rated players and lower rated players will kick your ass. I can drop or rise 200 Elo points in a couple of hours easily.

Lichess starts you out at 1500 vs chess.com's 1200. So the whole bell curve is shifted.

IIRC in chess.com you can start as beginner/intermediate/advanced and your initial rating will be 800/1200/1600 respectively.

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