Gameknot, a chess platforms with some interesting ideas!

Intro

A few days ago I was looking for well annotated chess games and I stumbled upon a chess platform called Gameknot. And while the web design is atrocious, my experience was really positive. And even if it has most of the same features Lichess has, it's the focus on different things that made it stand out for me.

Note that I am not being paid to promote this platform - I doubt they make any money anyway. I honestly liked the experience. Let's get into it.

Gameknot

So what is it? Gameknot is a platform for playing correspondence chess. The shortest possible game is 2 days and the norm is 3. You can play "Live chess", which would be real time chess, but it's like an afterthought. Correspondence is the core.

Other than that it has puzzles, a kind of Explorer (with just the 4 million games played on their platform), annotated games, forums, clubs, analysis and other stuff like that, just like Lichess.

The ideas

Because I just registered there, I can't declare intimate knowledge of all of its workings. For example I found out about Live Chess while checking the accuracy of this post. But there were some ideas that came to me after the experience I've had that I think may be genius. So here they are.

Easier to accept play

If you know me, you probably are aware that I don't play that much chess and when I do it's not looking good. The reasons are multiple, including a lack of time, personal preference to code LiChess Tools rather than use it to learn chess, the nagging shame that I suck at this game and so on. Yet when I joined Gameknot, I got two challenges almost immediately.

At first I thought it was an automated thing, but no, they were real players. And because it's correspondence, why even bother to decline? You have all the time in the world, right?

So just like that, because I was challenged to play in a comfortable format, I started to play chess. That's a big deal! But there is more.

Long time controls by design

You see, Lichess has a correspondence game format, but what happens is that people start the game and make the moves at blitz speed anyway, unless they are truly dedicated to thinking it through. They have the option to play as fast as they want. Instead, on Gameknot, the "it's your move" status updates in 30 minutes or something. You CANNOT play fast even if you wanted to. Or at least that's how it felt to me, I may be wrong, but I was playing two games at the same time and the status for both was updating at the same time. This leads to higher quality games and less enabling of addictive behaviors.

There is a way to go around this, by playing conditional moves, which might sound familiar because Lichess has them too. You add lines to the current position and when the opponent moves, the conditional move plays immediately, but if you start thinking about the position enough that you generate candidate moves, you are already on the path to greatness.

Simpler challenges

Why was I challenged so fast anyway? And why did I get a new challenge immediately after I finished one of the games? I think here comes another brilliant idea: instead of relying on people to actively create games, have a pool of "challengeable" people. The algorithm can be refined, but in my mind it should be something like: played chess recently or it's a new player, didn't decline anything lately and has a rating close to yours and prefers the same time controls. A lot can be added here, like having the same chatting preferences, a common language, playing similar systems, even a machine learning matching system that optimizes for challenges successfully accepted and quality games.

Not an automated challenge system, which would be too intrusive, but a pool of people that the machine thinks you would have fun playing with.

Play not talk

And last, the chat. Used to politeness when playing on Lichess, I greeted my opponents, told them good game at the end and so on. In three games no one replied. It's not a social network, it's a game playing network. Chess speaks for itself, I guess ;)

They do have forums, but there is like a message every few days. It's probably a side effect of the dedicated small user base, but I liked it.

Conclusion

What if instead of having only a pool of games started by a certain category of people who like to do that, we would also have a list of people that have increased chances to accept playing with you in particular and have fun doing it? A sort of "recommended friends" list, perhaps?

What if we would focus some features to enable easy correspondence games, with a minimum time per move, thus encouraging better chess?

And what if we would focus on playing, rather than obsessing over ratings, complaining about everything and our culturally approved outrage?

I am not sure how I can integrate these ideas in LiChess Tools. The pool of users, for example, can only be implemented by Lichess themselves, as I don't have access to a database of users and their characteristics, nor is there a Lichess API for searching players based on parameters. Maybe that would be a good start, thus enabling a plethora of new ways to find chess partners.

What do you guys think?