We’re excited to announce a series of changes to improve your puzzle-solving experience! We’ve reworked our Puzzles rating system so it’s more reliable—giving you smoother level progression and generally more satisfying experience when solving puzzles. Also, you can now choose between three puzzle difficulty levels, to help you customize your solving sessions.
Let’s dive into the updates:
New Puzzles Rating
You’ll notice your Puzzles rating has changed significantly, and it’s probably lower than you remember. But don’t worry—this is not simply a downward adjustment inside the same rating system. Instead, this change is the result of an entirely new rating system, and with it the re-rating of every player and puzzle on Chess.com.
The old Puzzles ratings were significantly inflated. Because of this, they lost a lot of their meaning, as it was difficult to translate them into actual playing or tactical strength. They also made it difficult for us to accurately rate the puzzles themselves, which in turn made it harder for us to serve you with puzzles that were difficult enough to be challenging, and yet not too difficult to solve at all.
Part of the reason for this is that our old rating system was also “too generous.” Historically, we have added features to make Puzzles a fun and rewarding experience, such as a minimum five-point rating gain for each solved puzzle, partial credit for incomplete solutions, and more. Over time, this led to massive rating inflation for players, which affected the ratings of the puzzles as well.
The new Puzzles rating system behaves much more like blitz and rapid ratings. In fact, you’ll notice your new Puzzles rating is now much closer to your other ratings.
More Consistent Puzzle Difficulty
The new Puzzles rating system uses the same Glicko-style rating logic that we use for your regular chess games. We’ve removed the features that would give you extra rating points, which will avoid rating inflation—while still awarding you Puzzle Points to keep you engaged and coming back for more!
As a result, the new method for calculating your rating is much more accurate. And because of this, we’ll also be able to serve you better puzzles!
We now know for sure that two players rated 1200 in Puzzles are about equally skilled at tactics, and that two 1200-rated puzzles are equally difficult. This helps us serve you better puzzles, giving you the right level of challenge to keep you engaged and improving!
While we understand “losing rating” can be upsetting, we strongly believe that the new system will be beneficial to everyone. And it’s always nice to remember that the lower number doesn’t mean you’re any less skilled as before at solving puzzles. In reality, we’re just using a different yardstick to measure your puzzle-solving ability, which is still as good as always!
And don’t worry—we’ve made sure your new rating is accurate by replaying our full history of puzzle attempts (about 17 billion!) to re-rate both members and puzzles using the new algorithm.
Choose Your Difficulty
You can also now adjust the difficulty setting of your puzzles to customize how challenging they are. Clicking the cog icon below the Hint button will open the Puzzles settings. From there, you can choose between the Standard, Hard, or Extra Hard difficulty. The difficulty level is relative to your Puzzles rating and will influence how hard it is for you to get each puzzle right.
The “Standard” option is the new default. Puzzles at this level will be challenging, but you should get most of them right. We’ve adjusted the default difficulty of our puzzles based on research that shows that a higher success rate is optimal for learning. Standard puzzles will be much easier than our old puzzles, but will still give your brain a great workout!
“Hard” will make the puzzles a bit harder, and “Extra Hard” will feel much closer to what our old Puzzles system would give you. And for those of you who enjoy spicy challenges, we’re planning to add an “Extreme” option soon!
The harder you set the difficulty, the more rating points you’ll gain when you get a puzzle right. However, it’ll be harder for you to find the right answer in the first place!
This new setting gives you more control, allowing you to customize the challenge level in your puzzle sessions based on your needs and mood.
Share Your Thoughts
We understand this is a big change, and a lot of care and planning went into it. We hope that you’ll find the new rating more accurate and reliable, and that our new features continue to make Puzzles a fun experience! As always, we look forward to hearing your thoughts. Please share your feedback in the comment section below.
