During these times, playing chess the classic way - face-to-face - is in many parts of the world a nice-to-have. The most popular type of chess today is the one you play online, real-time, on dedicated websites like chess.com. This requires being connected to the server while playing the game. 

Unfortunately, if you search the Internet, you'll find plenty of reports of chess.com lag problems - people losing matches because of time even though they have good Internet plans. And that's basically caused by bad Internet connectivity. So - how can you avoid chess.com lag / latency issues during games?

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.

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 1000 ms? (preferably not)

Assuming that everything is fine, here's how you can troubleshoot chess.com lag:

1. Restart your modem, router and device you’re playing on chess.com – computer, smartphone. You may also update your router’s firmware, if that’s available.
2. Move closer to the Wi-Fi router or, better yet, use a wired Ethernet connection if possible.
3. Move around till you get better cellular coverage, if no other connections are available.
4. For best results, make sure no other apps are hogging bandwidth or memory o your device.
5. Check if your ISP is having temporary issues. They should have a status page or at least a social media account to communicate that.

Of course, if you want to avoid wasting time going through all the steps above, you can just 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 cellular data available on your smartphone, so you can combine that with your home Internet. You’ll need a channel bonding app like Speedify for that.

Speedify uses a technology called channel bonding that allows you to use multiple Internet connections at once. On your smartphone – it’s the Wi-Fi and cellular data that can be bonded. 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. It is also a fast bonding VPN. It 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?

• If you connect to a VPN server close to a chess.com server you may get better lag than connecting directly.
• When using 2 or more connections together with Speedify, the resulting chess.com lag will be the lowest of all individual connections.

Speedify also routes data when something happens to one of your connections. When you stumble upon a bad Wi-Fi hotspot, or your connection suddenly goes out, you will stay connected. Speedify intelligently and automatically reroutes your data through the other available connection(s) until you are connected again to both networks. Best of all, you don’t notice anything because Speedify works seamlessly.

No more chess.com lag! That's a proven fact if you use Speedify. Try it now!