How many people are actually playing?

When I log on it says there are 29,000+ players in live chess.... and 10,000+ games...

When looking at the board, there is only ever 5-10 game seeks... and a lot of time there are fewer than 5...

So are these numbers made up or what? It's been this way for years... why aren't there more games available? Considering how most everyone plays 1-5 minute games there should be a lot of seeks, right?

The seek graph only shows the matches where an automatic match didn't occur-- perhap people want some custom time control or some variant that isn't very popular.

What? It shows 5 min games 2/1 games all the time... those are the standard time controls that should just auto match all the time- therefore there would almost never be a 5 minute game.

When I seek a 5 minute game it never ever automatches it immediately... something is wrong here.

When I scroll over those seeks, they are almost all computers seeking matches.

There is also one guy who wants a 15 14 game, another who wants a 7 0 game and another who wants 60 5.

I'm sorry, sir, but I don't believe you have any information to provide any meaningful insights into this topic. Please don't give a nonsense answer when you don't have a real one.

When I ask for random opponent, I seem to get one pretty fast (within 5-10 secs).

Unless I'm playing a computer pretending to be human...

What I don't get is that many don't respond to my chats : (    Makes for a less fun game when you can't talk to your opponent.  There should be 2-way voice conversations with at least people from the same country.

The answer about the seek graph only showing unmatched games comes from a chess.com article announcing changes in the seek graph several years ago.

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/livechess/new-logic-for-auto-pairing-and-seek-graph

The list of what I saw comes from my taking my time to go to V2 and take a look.

You're welcome.

It isn't just about the time control. It could be the players in the graph have their rating range too narrow, so the automatic process doesn't find a match. 

Go to V2 and look at the list of the games being played, and sort them by time control. When I did it, I saw 20 pages of 1 0 games, 8 pages of 2 1 games.

I am not going to count them all but at 20 games per page, those two categories alone would have 1,120 players.

Dude... go build something useful. Don't be an armchair critic. As a founder I have to tell you, I have met many miserable people like you.

I don't know what you think I'm criticizing, I simply stated a few facts that I observed. I guess I should videotape it and post it on my youtube so you can see what I'm seeing.

The notmtwain post seems to indicate that someone created a seek system based at least in part on "USER BEHAVIOUR" ... that would seem to suggest that there is a human element at play and maybe I'm experiencing something unique and my comments and observations may not be applicable to the overall system. Thank you for clearing that up.

Here is an example of the seek graph I just now grabbed:

If you watch if for a bit you will see some games come in and go away quickly. Some of the ones that stay the longest are the computer players but there are some regular games there too. It's hard to say why they are there but it could be because their seek rating ranges are too narrow, especially when they have normal time controls, or they are in a non-standard control.

I'm no math expert, but it looks rather blank for 20,000 players to be logged in... Or at least that's the only point I'm trying to make... It just feels like there should be more seeks if there's actually that many players....

Is it just that 15,000 of those players are above 1800 and refuse to play anyone below that?

Not all members in Live are putting out random seeks and most random seeks are likely paired quickly. Many members are watching top rated games, some are actively playing games, and may get paired before they ever show up on the graph (or are paired before the refresh interval). Having a low number of seeks waiting to be paired is a good thing; it is a little bad if you have a wide rating range in your seeks and you are not getting paired quickly, especially if you don't have any account restrictions.

And to answer you last question, I would guess many players don't have their lower seek setting at infinity. I would guess most have it at -50 and maybe -200.

I just now finished a game and there were zero seeks in the graph... zero. I hid the computers in the settings and I have a screenshot, but it saved in PDF, how do I show that here?

20,000 people online and 0 game seeks? Man, that's gotta be pretty rare...

You can't upload PDFs. You can upload an image.

Right now there are  bunch of seeks. Make sure you also don't have rating filters set.

There. I converted it to JPG somehow.

I just finished playing that game and this was literally the seek graph. I have infinite on rating above and below, and I have hid the computers. Before I started this game there were about 3-4 standard chess games, 2 tournaments, and 1 crazyhouse, and 1 three-check. After my game, this is what the graph showed.

It feels like some power is saying, "Ok, one game is enough. Go away now." or else "Man, you're a jerk. You hang around here and were not going to play with you." That's just how it feels.

Here is what I just saw:

Is it possible you have been flagged for timing out too many games? I know that will limit how often one can play. I guess it might also prevent seeing the graph.

1. I suppose it is possible. But out of thousands of games over years I pretty much only time out when the internet cuts out. Although I do lose an awful lot of games on time, but only because my clock expired, not because I wasn't playing.

2. Your seek graph is about what I usually see, but doesn't that seem sparse? 6 of those are computers, 4 of those are tournaments, 3 of them are "jokes" by people who have purposefully worked to get their rating as low as possible. For "20,000 online players" it seems like scraping the last bit of peanut butter out of the jar. I'm just having a hard time understanding this.

As explained previously, 99% of games are automatically matched within seconds after choosing a time control and pressing the Play button.

They never appear on the graph.