Losing Too Much on Time While Playing on Chess.com?
Your clock keeps running while Chess.com waits for a move you already made, and you lose on time in a winning position. That delay is lag (the round trip between your device and Chess.com’s servers), and it grows when your internet connection is shared with other heavy users, or your signal is weak.
Speedify is an app that splits a game’s traffic across Wi-Fi and 4G/5G cellular at once, so a slow moment on one internet connection does not eat your clock. Speedify can only keep you online through a drop when it has two or more internet connections to work with, for example Wi-Fi plus your phone’s 4G/5G cellular. On a single connection, Speedify works as an encrypted VPN and cannot stop that connection from dropping. Speedify cannot shorten the route to Chess.com’s servers, but with two or more connections in Redundant Mode it sends each packet over every connection and uses the copy that arrives first, so your ping follows whichever connection is faster at that moment. Inside, you will find what lag means in live chess, where it comes from, and how playing with Speedify running protects your remaining time.
Speedify keeps your game responsive when one connection spikes.
What is Lag in Live Chess? What Causes It?
In this context, lag (or latency) indicates a higher-than-normal delay between you and chess.com servers. The more lag you have, the longer it takes to communicate with the game server. This has an important effect on blitz and bullet games on chess.com. And, of course, it’s most frustrating when you’re in a winning position!
When you have a bad connection to chess.com, with high latency, it’s highly likely you will get disconnected. And that will register as you abandoning the game, thus losing it. Even if you were one move away from victory.
There are several causes why chess.com lag appears:
- chess.com servers are down.
- issues with Internet CDN services used by chess.com.
- temporary infrastructure issues with your ISP.
- slow and flaky Internet on your side: being too far away from the Wi-Fi hotspot or having poor cellular coverage.
How to Fix Chess.com Lag
To rule out chess.com related issues, check their Twitter account for announcements regarding outages.
To determine the cause of chess.com lag, test your online speed. Is the speed close enough to what you’re paying for? And, most important, is your lag (latency) higher than 100 ms? (preferably not)
Assuming that everything is fine, here’s how you can troubleshoot chess.com lag:
- Restart your modem, router and the device you’re playing chess.com on (computer, smartphone). You may also update your router’s firmware, if that’s available.
- Move closer to the Wi-Fi router or, better yet, use a wired Ethernet connection if possible.
- Move around till you get better cellular coverage, if no other connections are available.
- For best results, make sure no other apps are hogging bandwidth or memory on your device.
- Check if your ISP is having temporary issues. They should have a status page or at least a social media account to communicate that.
If the steps above do not fix it, you can use all of your Internet connections at once. This is what the Indian chess team did to deal with their connectivity issues at the Online Olympiad of 2020, which they also won.
Most likely, you have 4G/5G cellular available on your smartphone, so you can combine that with your home Internet. You’ll need an app that combines internet connections, like Speedify, for that.
How Speedify Helps with Lag on Chess.com
Speedify combines internet connections, which allows you to use multiple Internet connections at once. On your smartphone, Speedify combines Wi-Fi and 4G/5G cellular. On a computer, there’s more flexibility about the number and type of connections.
The beauty of it is that Speedify does more than just manage your Internet connections. Speedify also works like a VPN: Speedify encrypts all of the data you send and receive from your device. This helps keep your private information and conversations secure from digital eavesdroppers and cyber thieves.
How does that impact lag (latency)? How does Speedify help solve chess.com lag?
- Speedify cannot shorten the route to Chess.com, so pick the Speedify server closest to you to keep the route short.
- When using 2 or more connections together with Speedify in Redundant mode, each move goes over every connection and the first copy to arrive counts, so a slow moment on one connection does not delay the move.
Speedify also reroutes data when something happens to one of your connections. When you stumble upon a bad Wi-Fi hotspot, or one connection suddenly goes out, Speedify intelligently and automatically reroutes your data through the other available connection(s) in milliseconds and keeps the same public IP address, so Chess.com keeps your game session.
With two or more internet connections running through Speedify, a weak Wi-Fi moment no longer has to cost you on the clock.
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