Your heart starts racing as the clock ticks down to just two seconds left. Afraid of hitting the three-minute mark, you blunder a queen and lose game. And now you’re wondering how this will impact your rating. Until you look at engine powering the math behind it, the change feels arbitrary. Blitz chess may be … Read more

Then it’s the end of a weekend tournament and you’re left feeling unsure whether you realy improved because your score felt solid but your rating didn’t budge much. Someone else scores fewer points yet their rating leaps significantly, because it’s not always as simple as the score, but rather who you played. The average rating … Read more

A Swiss tournament ends with three players tied for first place, then comes the real deal. You’ve seen their boards; you’ve watched them play. But the pairings software only sees numbers, and now it has to sort the chaos. That’s what progressive tiebreaks are for. It is not just about who won more games, but … Read more

Suddenly you’re at the end of the turn, and forest is silent. You’ve realized that you counted warrior attrition towards your score. This result in losing three victory points. It happens to everyone, even those who have played dozens of games. It happens to everyone. The disconnect between military dominance and actualy scoring is brutal, … Read more

The nature of Swiss tournaments is strange; you’ll play five good rounds, earn four points, and turn around after your final round to see your name below that of another person with four points. The reason? Often it’s the Buchholz, a tiebreaker that determines how strong the other people are, not how good you are. … Read more

After a night of board gaming, you gather around the table and look at the score sheet. There are ties everywhere. Was it really a match-up between those teams? Or did luck cancel out any real differance in ability? It’s tempting to go with your raw intuition, but it doesn’t always work here. That’s where … Read more

You’ve been there: you play an opponent who’s worse than you. You lose points in your rating. Online chess is rigged! Right? Wrong. The problem was, you didn’t factor in the uncertainty. There’s actualy two numbers behind your rating. One is your skill, and the other is how sure the system is about that skill. … Read more