Your honesty here actually shipped another change to the platform. The pattern you described - "I'll play at a low level to protect my rating and keep accumulating GAMBIT" - is exactly the failure mode the reward function has to design against. So I rebuilt the reward calibration this week to make that strategy uneconomical, and I want to walk you through what changed.

The reward per win now scales sharply with the level you're playing at:

• Level 1 (Just learned the rules) - 5 GAMBIT per win
• Level 3 (A little experience) - 10 GAMBIT per win
• Level 5 (Intermediate) - 14 GAMBIT per win
• Level 8 (Good player)  - 25 GAMBIT per win
• Level 9 (Strong player) - 30 GAMBIT per win
• Level 10 (Grandmaster level) - 50 GAMBIT per win

Sitting at Level 1 to "stay safe" now pays 5 GAMBIT per win. Climbing to Level 10 pays 50 - ten times as much. Staying low to accumulate isn't profitable anymore; growing is. The progression itself is automatic too: a streak of wins at any level promotes you to the next, a streak of losses moves you back down. So the natural movement is upward as long as you're genuinely competitive at your current band, and the system quickly finds your real level without you having to manage it manually.

The underlying logic: per-game economics favor the player who's actually competitive at their level. Someone winning consistently at their rating band earns proportionally to that band. Someone trying to grind below their real level earns the small payouts that lower-level players get. The reward function is based on the difficulty of the chess, not the volume of clicks.

For where you sit specifically: if you're not an advanced player, that's completely fine - the platform isn't trying to push everyone toward grandmaster ratings. The honest move is to find the level where the chess is challenging but winnable for you, settle there, and grow at your own pace if you want to. The rewards scale with the level you legitimately belong at, whatever that level is. That should remove the temptation to "protect rating" by playing down - the rating that pays best is the one that matches your real strength.

Thank you for surfacing this. Two consecutive product fixes this week came directly from posts in this thread (the onboarding level-selector after coupable, and this reward calibration after you). The build cadence is much faster when the feedback is this specific.

Daniel

Following up on this, your feedback turned into a build, and I want to show you what shipped this week.

The matchmaking gap you ran into came from a specific failure mode: new accounts default to a low starting rating and have to climb out of it through calibration games. For an advanced player, those first few games were exactly the bad experience you described - "guest with zero knowledge" because the system genuinely didn't know yet that it was matching against an advanced opponent.

Fix that's now live: an explicit level-selection step at signup before the first game.
The user picks where they sit on a 10-point scale, with descriptions calibrated against actual chess strength rather than abstract ELO numbers. A grandmaster picks "10", a club player picks "9", an intermediate picks "5-7", a beginner picks "0-2". The matchmaker then starts pairing the account to its corresponding rating band immediately, rather than forcing calibration games first. The level can be changed from the lobby at any time if it was set wrong, so the first impression isn't permanent.

This doesn't solve the population problem - we still have fewer 2000-rated players online at any moment than Lichess does - but it does fix the specific symptom you hit. A new advanced player now lands in the right rating band on game one rather than fighting through six bad games to get there. If you're willing to give it another try with the level set correctly, the matchmaking experience should be much closer to what you'd expect from a serious chess platform with a rating system.

I appreciate the critique. The honest version - "this isn't competitive with Lichess yet" - is the version of feedback that actually moves the product. Generic praise doesn't ship code; pointed criticism does. So thank you for taking the time to actually try it and say what you found.

Daniel

Your framing is the correct one. "Compete head-on with Lichess" is a losing pitch, and I don't make it. "Have something they don't" is the actual strategic position, and it has to be true at the product level before any of the token economics matters.

The thing Lichess and Chess.com structurally cannot have is an economy where the platform's success belongs to the players who built it. Their business model is ads, subscriptions, and tournament sponsorships - all flowing one way, from user attention to platform revenue. The chess gets better; the player gets a number. That's not a criticism, it's a description of how the incumbents are designed. We're trying to build the same chess product on a different ownership structure: every meaningful action mints to the player, the platform takes its share through transparent fee splits, and the people who built the audience hold the surface they built it on. That's the "something they don't have." Whether it's enough to move advanced players off Lichess is the open question - it probably won't move all of them, but it doesn't need to. It needs to move enough that a working economy can sustain itself, with sufficient density across meaningful rating bands to make the chess product good for the players who do choose to play here.

On the Binance listing point - you're right that it's a long shot, and you're also right that it's the kind of milestone that would change the project's reach significantly. Realistically, the path looks more like tier-2 CEX listings first (MEXC, Gate, BitMart range), then tier-1 over time if volume and on-chain activity justify it. Going for Binance as an opening move would be naive at this stage; building toward it through proof points (volume, holders, real platform usage) is the version that has a chance.

The piece I think most outside observers underestimate is that the chess audience is enormous, sticky, and not particularly served by crypto today. Hundreds of millions of players worldwide, intense national engagement in India, Armenia, post-Soviet Europe, and increasingly the global south. Even capturing a fractional slice of that audience as token holders is a much larger user base than most utility tokens ever reach. The challenge isn't the size of the opportunity; it's execution against the gap between the current product and where the product needs to be to deserve that audience. Coupable's post in this thread is the honest version of where that gap currently sits.

Thank you for thinking about it strategically rather than just up/down voting the proposal. That's the kind of post that's actually useful in shaping how the project gets pitched.

Daniel

We'll never know whether they do it right and are committed to their roadmap, but they can compete with Lichess or Chess.com; they should have something that these two popular chess platforms don't.
They will have a big impact if they can list their token, Gambit, on a popular exchange like Binance and maintain their trading volume. It's a long shot, but it's possible.

The case is not in dispute. FortuneJack lost the court case and did not pay the amount ordered by the court.
The difference that FortuneJack did not pay out is $20k.

Accepted! Welcome to the Campaign, as the first week has started please update your Signatures and Avatars ASAP! We added links to the Signature as they were missing when I posted the thread so if you already wear the signature I'll need you to update it to the latest version.

We are now CFNP. Thank you all for your applications!