Compete at Reflex Chess

A duel is fifteen puzzles against somebody solving the same fifteen. A rated game is a game on a clock. Both move a Glicko-2 rating, and they move two different ones.

Three ways to compete

All three sit behind one button in the app and all three are free. They differ in what they measure, which is why two of them move different ratings.

• Challenge a friendA link you send. A real game against the person who opens it, and they need no account to play
• A rated game on the clockAn opponent at your rating, in any pool from 1+0 to 30+20
• A puzzle duel15 puzzles, both sides racing the same set

The duel: fifteen puzzles, same set, same order

A duel deals 15 puzzles and gives both sides the same ones in the same order. Score is how many you solve; a tie breaks on total time; a hard cap of 3 minutes ends it whatever the score. The one rule that makes it a duel rather than a solo run: a wrong move loses that puzzle and moves you on. It does not end your run. You can misplay three and still win.

The puzzles come from the same pools the trainer's timed mode uses — 12,059 positions across 14 pools, rated 404 to 2970 by the Lichess database — dealt near both players' duel ratings and ramping upward, so the hard ones land at the end where a lead is worth something.

Your opponent is not a fixed rate. Whether they solve a given puzzle depends on how far that puzzle sits from their own duel rating, and so does how long they take:

That is the whole feature. An opponent 400 points below the puzzle still finds it 50% of the time and one 400 points above it still misses 12% of the time, which is what produces a bar that stalls on one you found instantly and then rattles off three while you are stuck. A constant-rate opponent reads as a progress bar inside two duels.

Rated games, on a clock

11 time controls, from 1+0 to 30+20, and the pool you pick changes more than the clock: it changes how deep your opponent is allowed to look. Nobody calculates four moves ahead with two seconds left, and an opponent who did would not read as a person.

What the numbers mean — 5+3, increment against delay, and where bullet becomes blitz — has its own page, because it is the question most people arrive with.

Two ratings

Reflex Chess carries two ratings and not one, because a fast pattern-recogniser and a good blitz player are not the same person and one number would make each ladder noisy with the other's results. Both are Glicko-2, which means both carry a second number — how sure the system is — and that second number is what lets a new account find its level in a handful of games instead of fifty.

• How the rating worksGlicko-2, rating deviation and volatility, worked on real numbers
• Puzzle rating vs game ratingWhy the two numbers disagree, and why that is not a fault
• The leaderboardTop 100 on each board

Who you are playing

Who you play. When you use the queue — the “find me an opponent” button — you are matched with a computer opponent at your level. They carry a username, a country and a rating that moves on their results, and the rating is the honest part: it is not a label somebody typed, it is a number their wins and losses have pushed around. What the queue is not is a room of strangers waiting to play. If you want a game against a specific person, that is what a challenge link is for, and it is a real game between the two of you.

The same thing is said inside the app, in the About section: “when you compete, you may be matched with AI players”. It is there rather than buried in a policy page because a disclosure nobody reaches is not one.