I've noticed on a few occasions in my 2.5 months here on Lichess that I'll get paired with a player I just played an hour ago. This only happened on chess.com a couple of times in 5 years there. Does anyone know the rough sizes of the user bases of various chess sites?
One possibility I can think of it could be your search was similar because you can adjust your search criteria more precisely than you can at chess.com
Lichess has a huge player base
78k players currently on chesscom, 54k on lichess. That should give a rough comparison.
What's more important is the quality of players. On lichess I'm in the 63th percentile while on chesscom I'm in 82th and I am not a good player at all. It means on chesscom play mostly beginners or inactive accounts, so you will have a hard time finding a wide variety of opponents your level there.
@pointlesswindows It's true that chesscom has a lot more inactive accounts but their current playerbase is larger nonetheless. I wouldn't say that there are a lot more beginners there although we would need some statistics for that.
@pointlesswindows You can find many players at almost any level on either site.
@rokoroks Did you completely ignore the numbers I said? Between 63th and 82th percentile it's like a mountain difference.
@pointlesswindows How many of those worse accounts are inactive?
@imakitty I know a guy who is 2000 on chesscom and he sometimes gets the same opponent in 1 hour, so the base of expert level players isn't big. He doesn't play on lichess but the ratings here are more inflated.
This topic has been archived and can no longer be replied to.