Could we please have a correspondence leaderboard?

As we know, Lichess has given little to no importance to correspondence chess recently. Now, I understand that they might have their own reasons for this, but not even having a “You are better than ___% of correspondence players” statistic seems a bit much.

Now, I’m not a good correspondence player at all, but I do feel that correspondence chess has been left with little more than a rating system. Some of us have only been on Lichess for a year or two, or perhaps even less, but I’ve heard that there used to be a correspondence leaderboard back in the day.

I really hope Lichess sees this and considers bringing it back. It would be nice to see correspondence chess receive a little more recognition on the platform.

@Chess4ever002 said ^

As we know, Lichess has given little to no importance to correspondence chess recently. Now, I understand that they might have their own reasons for this, but not even having a “You are better than ___% of correspondence players” statistic seems a bit much.

Now, I’m not a good correspondence player at all, but I do feel that correspondence chess has been left with little more than a rating system...

I assume there is a reason for this, but still a good idea.

There are far better sites than lichess to play correspondence chess (with a much lower rate of abandoned games as well).

The reason is that it is to easy to cheat in correspondence. The best they can do is exclude motivation for cheating, which a leaderboard certainly is.

Also, I think a lot of people have a hard time getting their correspondence RD low enough to qualify for a leaderboard. Those that do play several games simultaneously, and probably end up blitzing through their queue; not exactly the behavior a leaderboard should measure.

I would love to shift exclusively to Lichess, but sadly the correspondence chess experience here is a poor second to chess.com. The absence of a leaderboard and the difficulty of establishing a rating without that pesky "?" are the two main reasions.

About the "?" on ratings, I recommended to Lichess Glickman's suggestion https://www.glicko.net/glicko/glicko.pdf :

Because a player in the Glicko system has both a rating and an RD, it is usually more informative to summarize a player’s strength in the form of an interval (rather than merely report a rating). One way to do this is to report a 95% confidence interval. The lowest value in the interval is the player’s rating minus twice the RD, and the highest value is the player’s rating plus twice the RD. So, for example, if a player’s rating is 1850 and the RD is 50, the interval would go from 1750 to 1950. We would then say that we’re 95% confident that the player’s actual strength is between 1750 and 1950. When a player has a low RD, the interval would be narrow, so that we would be 95% confident about a player’s strength being in a small interval of values.

https://github.com/lichess-org/lila/issues/6864

Chess players seem to be analytically and emotionally tied to rating as a single number. Changing that would be like convincing Americans to go metric. Not gonna happen.

correspondence allows opening explorer and endgame tablebase. So it isn't fair for people to have a leaderboard in correspondence

@mcgoves said ^

Chess players seem to be analytically and emotionally tied to rating as a single number. Changing that would be like convincing Americans to go metric. Not gonna happen.

I can still offer the suggestion a thousand times since eventually it's the right thing to do.

You should try Lichess Ladders. It's a lot like what you need. And with LiChess Tools installed, it's integrated into Lichess.