Vale instantchess.com

One of the few time wasting activities I still indulge in is speed chess. (1 minute per player for the entire game is the slowest time control I play online.) There are a number of excellent free online sites available, but one that wasn’t quite in that category was “instantchess.com.” One terrible aspect of this website was that your opponents were random, and in particular it completely disregarded ratings when assigning matches. Actually, it was slightly worse than this; it seemed to have a preference for setting up games between people who had played before, but the algorithm included games which one immediately abandoned because of the rating differential. So you would end up in cycles where you would abandon a game because of the mismatch, and the site would immediately assign you the same opponent. Even though lichess.org (and other places) are infinitely better and free, this website was much older and maintained mostly voluntarily, so one really shouldn’t complain. Moreover, even though it wasn’t a perfect site, there was a certain simplicity which meant that I often found myself playing there. Perhaps some of the appeal was the generosity of the rating system: the last time I played I was ranked 13th out of all 7000 or so lightning players, and had a “2400+” rating which I promise is greatly flattering to me:

I don’t think I ever played the top ranked player, but I did play most people on this list a few times. I would assume that none of them are GMs. I do wonder how many GMs I have inadvertently played on lichess — I’ve certainly been absolutely crushed often enough for it to be possible. (Definitely the best improvement on lichess was preventing anonymous users from using the chat feature.)

The flip side of this website going down is that it might push me to more useful ways of wasting my time!