If you've tried playing rated puzzles on Chess.com, you will notice your score goes up and down as you solve puzzles or get them incorrect.
But why sometimes do you lose so many points for wrong puzzles, or get so few points for correct ones?
Your Puzzles Rating goes up and down in the same way as your Chess rating does! That is, when you solve a puzzle, the rating of the puzzle is compared to your Puzzles Rating, and the amount of points you get is based on that.
So, for example, if you have a Puzzle Rating of 2000, and you correctly solve a puzzle that is only rated 1000, you will not get very many points. But, if you get the 1000 rated puzzle wrong, you will lose a lot of points!
Conversely, if you are rated 2000 Puzzle Rating, and you correctly solve a puzzle rated 2500, you will get a lot of points! But if you get a 2500 rated puzzle wrong, you won't lose very many.
Puzzle ratings are different than Chess ratings in one important way: Your Puzzle Rating will always go up when you get a puzzle right!
If you are playing chess, and you win against someone who is many hundreds of points lower than you, you might not get any points. But even if you solve the easiest puzzle, you will get at least 1 point for it.
Pending puzzles
Sometimes you might come across a puzzle that you get wrong, but you still get 1 point for. These are pending puzzles, which have not yet been rated:
About 5% of the puzzles you run into will be new puzzles that have not yet been rated. You will never lose points for getting one of these Pending puzzles wrong!
How is the rating of each puzzle decided?
You may notice that when you get a puzzle wrong or right, your Puzzle Rating changes, but the rating of the puzzle does not. This is because the rating of each puzzle is locked after a certain point.
When a puzzle is newly added, its rating is determined by who is able to solve it, but after a set amount of time, the puzzle rating becomes locked in place and does not change anymore.
In some cases, if a puzzle rating is found to be too high or too low, Chess.com may adjust the rating to be more accurate.