[tzs]

Humans can also be disappointing and interesting. I like to do Lichess puzzles not logged in, which mostly gives puzzles with a Lichess puzzle ratings in the 1400-1600 range with some going down to around 1200 or up to the 1700s. Presumably that is the range the average Lichess player is in.

For those who have not used Lichess, the puzzles it gives (unless you ask for a specific type) do not tell you what the goal is (mate, win material, get a winning endgame, save a bad position, etc) or how many moves it will take.

Here are some puzzles it has recently given me and their current ratings. These all have something in common.

  1492 https://lichess.org/training/KsrR0
  1506 https://lichess.org/training/RwLfy
  1545 https://lichess.org/training/TzZdx
  1557 https://lichess.org/training/IJfT7
  1564 https://lichess.org/training/oOMz4
  1604 https://lichess.org/training/uRRck
  1661 https://lichess.org/training/jBrLX
  1719 https://lichess.org/training/cpKAM

What they have in common is that they are all mate in one. I have seen composed mate in ones that puzzled even high rated players, but they involved something unusual like the mating move was an en passant capture.

None of the above puzzles are tricks like that.

So how are enough people failing them for their ratings to be that high?

[benmmurphy]

i assume lichess has time based puzzles so people can be failing the puzzles because they are trying to optimize how many puzzles they solve rather than making no mistakes. also, i suspect lichess puzzle ratings probably do not match with lichess chess ratings (sure, they probably correlate but i suspect there could easily be a +200 average difference or something like that between them) . i can solve puzzles consistently at least 1000 rating higher on chess.com than my chess.com rapid rating. also, if you know these puzzles are mate in 1 then they are much easier. i'm guessing you didn't know when you initially solved them but i think its much harder for other people to judge the difficulty of these puzzles if they know the solution is mate in 1.

[tzs]

Lichess does have some puzzle modes that are timed, such as Puzzle Storm where you try to see how many puzzles you can solve in a fixed time, but their puzzle rating system doesn't take into account puzzles used in the timed modes.