Rising Through the Lichess Ladder: From 1500 to 1900

Photo by yang miao on Unsplash

The first ten to twenty games you play in online chess, and if I'm not mistaken this also applies to OTB chess, will be used to gauge what your playing strength is. In OTB, I believe this is usually calculated by taking the average rating of the players in the tournament, the ratings of your opponents, the ratings of the opponents that your opponents beat, and your final score. I'm not sure about the formula since they use programs to do this process automatically but that's the gist of it in OTB. In online chess, it's a bit different since you are given a tentative rating of 1500 (on Lichess) and every time you beat an opponent, they add points to your rating depending on your performance and your opponent's rating.

Since I've been playing chess online for quite some time before I joined Lichess, I wasn't new to the arena and I can somewhat go toe-to-toe with some beginner to intermediate level players on the platform. So that's why I was able to rise up the ladder quite quickly but only until about 1900. It still took time before I broke through 2000 and 2100. And from my previous post, you will know that I only broke through 2200 very recently, like six months ago. Not to mention that this was all just in bullet. Rapid and blitz are a whole other thing but I haven't really played much in the other two time control arenas so I'm not going to make any mention of them apart from this. Anyway, I'll just show the next two games I played on Lichess after my very first one.


This first game is a bit more substantial than the next one so I'll spend some time looking at this one with the help of the engine so that it would be more objective. This game was a bit easy for me because I felt that my opponent didn't have a very solid grasp of basics but then again, I was still pretty much an amateur myself at that point, the only thing that helped me progress a bit quicker in chess was my looking at how stronger people play and copying what they do then learning what it is that they were doing.

Anyway, at the beginning of the game, as I said I was pretty comfortable because I had a good center and I even won a piece. But as the game neared the last move that was played, I noticed that the engine's evaluation went from winning for White to only a slight advantage for White despite being up a piece and if you skip to the final position you might understand why. Black actually has two connected and mobile passed pawns in the center. If they can utilize that and exploit the weaknesses in my position, they could have equalized and even took the driver's seat in the game. However, Black ran out of time and wasn't able to do any of that.

In the next game, things were a bit more depressing for my opponent.

I played my usual favorite opening, the Sicilian and my opponent was probably getting frustrated at this point or they probably pre-moved so they lost a piece right off the bat and resigned thereafter. After this game, I found myself at 1900 bullet rating on Lichess. It's not really that difficult to get this far but trying to go even further or maintaining this level isn't easy at all. If you slack off or don't make much effort, you might find yourself slipping down as I experienced. I wasn't able to maintain a 2000 rating all the time. There were many instances at which went down to 1800 before bouncing back up to 2000 but those were frustrating times. When you look at the graph of my bullet rating progress on Lichess, it's like a very volatile stock, one day hitting rock bottom but then quickly rebounding the next day. It was only recently that I was able to maintain around 2100 to 2200 level but it really wasn't easy.