Puzzles

I normally love them, and according to the 2023 record of my activities I play a lot of them, and apparently I'm fairly good at them too, but I'm walking away from them, at least for now.

Maybe a little background. According to that 2023 record I did over 2400 puzzles last year. That's in the top 1% of puzzle players for the year! Not bad considering how many months I was in hospital without computer access, or even actually awake.

But if you look at the bell curve of puzzle players you'll first see it's a very lopsided curve and that most players who even try puzzles don't get much beyond a 500 rating before the whole thing loses it's appeal.

That's seems pretty strange to me, particularly when you consider how much Chess.com likes to brag about new puzzles in their monthly reports. Maybe they could publish their participation rates, and perhaps learn something about their side of things.

Chess.com is ignoring the appeal factor for puzzles and aren't paying much attention to the learning process either. They seem to be adding puzzle complexity while completely ignoring anything that might actually encourage players to stay with it and play the puzzles.

I have learned a lot from puzzles. In particular patterns that I could use in game play but what I'm finding now is that the puzzles I'm seeing don't make a lot of sense. I'm not learning a darned thing and for most of them, I look at them and can't see the intended resolution which of course should be Checkmate.

It's all good to chase a piece around the board but even once you reach that resolution, that doesn't end a game of Chess. Only Checkmate does that. So what are we doing here? Certainly, we're wasting a lot of time for "not learning a darned thing".

In fact, it's gotten so bad, with puzzles so complicated that I often can't even see where to start, never mind what the resolution is, again partly because the resolution often isn't Checkmate.

What is obvious is that Chess.com isn't paying attention to the appeal factor in puzzles. Players are voting with their feet too, finding something else to do, and now I'm one of them.

Hopefully someone involved in the process will read this.