Declining Rematch after a single white win

Best answer of the week on the same old complaint.

I'm confident that if you got your wish you'd be back complaining how often Chess players eat dinner. Your deal with your opponent is to spend time together for one match and if you both want to play again then there are options. Many players don't want to play again straight away. Analysing the previous match would be one reason. If you want to improve, you could use that time to analyse your loss. At the end of the match you could try asking politely if they'd like to play again in the future. The more demanding that you are, the less likely it is that they'd want to spend time with you in the future.

An explicit option would also split the matchmaking pool leading to longer search times and/or poorer quality matches. However, there is always more that can be done with matchmaking systems to automatically match players who are alike. It has its limitations though because players don't necessarily want to players who are similar to themselves. It'd cool to match stallers with each other and rude players with other rude players etc.

Not trying to hijack the thread, but do you guys find opponents play better in the rematch?

I generally think so. I wonder if it's a 'reversion to the mean' type thing?

Having said that, I also find I, more often than not, win the rematch too, just not as easily. If I beat someone badly enough their ego gets hurt (it's that noncompetitive), I'm probably just better.

This sounds a lot like Confirmation Bias. Be sure to understand it before holding beliefs like this. If you want to check your hypotheses then you could go through your match history and analyse the data.

Where's the confirmation bias?

I wouldn't mind a button that said "I would like to play this guy again." There's been games where I would like to rematch someone cos they have an interesting style of play or we actually spoke, but I don't want to do it that very moment. I've had players say they want to rematch me as well.

I'm not entirely sure how it would work. Ideally, if both players joined the queue at roughly the same time (within a couple of minutes say), it would just pair them automatically. Timing would be an issue though.

Right now, the only way to do it is to go through your friends list and see if anyone is online. It'd be good if there was a "rematch later" list on the landing page, and it displayed players who were online, and you can send a challenge directly from there. Should be straight forward, just reuse the old match settings. The "rematch" would then be removed from the list unless you explicitly click "rematch" again after the game. i'd also prefer it personally if I received a notification that someone else wants to "rematch later" with me and for it to be added to my own list.

I have my own personal experience to go by in framing my perceptions. Could those be subject to confirmation bias? Of course.
...But you have absolutely nothing to go by in suspecting me of confirmation bias. Confirmation bias about my confirmation bias?

Gottem. Game stalling is the real problem.

😄 Most of my rematches have been when my opponent has lost. I still wound up winning the rematches most of the time. It's more unusual for me to lose after one in that situation, but I wouldn't call my experiences typical or normal, and subject to change.

@CraigIreland is right though, there is some confirmation bias in your line of thinking. Playing "better" is quite subjective and difficult to prove, and is defined strictly and only by your own personal experiences. It can come under the "Anecdotal Fallacy."

This isn't to say that your observations are wrong here, more that it's just a very selective sample set.

its because white can so easily dictate how the game is played, if white wants he can play some slow, boring, dry opening where nothing happens or he can choose to play more dynamically with a more challenging setup and sharper game. also most white players either play the (boring) London system or some opening trap in the italian/scotch, which nobody wants to deal with in general.

The main reason why players as black play the Scandinavian, dutch, englund gambit, alekhine, and/or sicilian is to deny white most of his tricks/traps or whatever boring slow system he was about to play.

Anecdotal fallacy would be a more perceptive criticism I think, as it doesn't make unsupported claims that I'm falling prey to some bias, just that I don't have a sufficiently large or varied sample on which to draw my conclusions, which is probably true.

@Lent_Barsen I have noticed a similar pattern in the small sample of my rematches. But I am not really sure whether my opponent plays better or I play worse than them.