DATA SCIENCE
Is Blitz Rating on Lichess Inflated?
Figuring it out using Python
Lichess is currently the second most popular chess website.
But when it comes to criticism, one buzzword appears a lot: Rating inflation.
Especially chess.com fans speak of Lichess as “being inflated,” which makes one’s rating less valuable as a measure. But is this really the case? Is the rating on Lichess inflated?
Let’s find out.
But first, let me clarify where I got the data from. If you only want to see the results, feel free to skip forward.
Preparing the data
To determine whether rating inflation exists, ratings of accounts on Lichess are needed. Many of them. If there is inflation, the average rating should have increased over the last few years. I tried to find a potential data source, which took a lot of work.
While Lichess provides us with a lot of data, they don’t offer something like an accounts database. Yet, what can be found on the official Lichess database site are collections of all the games played from 2013 on for each month of the year.
For every month, there is a single file. Each file is written as a collection of PGNs, a popular game notation. This…
