That’s what is wrong with automatch.
There is no way to know with which settings someone else already started to wait in automatch.
And there is no button which would instantly choose such setting, so you instantly paired with someone who started to wait before you.
I suppose in the unluckiest case, there’s 17 other people (6 time settings, 3 board sizes) that have flexible turned off, and you just happened to pick the one setting that doesn’t match with any of them. (If you’re really unlucky, then there’s the handicap setting too, but if they’re around your rank, then that doesn’t matter).
With flexible turned on, it’s down to 8 other people in the unluckiest case.
Most things can be solved with just more people playing and queueing, assuming the matching is working correctly.
That said some kind of queue visualisation or activity visualisation might encourage people to select certain settings at popular times of the day. It might however disincentivise people to queue at unpopular times of the day.
For example if you see this
would you queue up now? Also I think it’s lying since like 1-2 games were completed in the last week and there’s no games in progress.
it would not matter how many different settings exist if there would be way to choose only among settings where someone else already started.
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If there were enough players queueing then equally there would be no need to want to only choose among ones where someone already started 
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bug:
I chose 5k - 5d, but was paired with 11k
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I wonder is it to do with
If you’re 5k, and selected up to 5d ~ 9 ranks away if it actually searched 5k ± 9 ranks, or something strange like that.
A couple of updates. First, there was a bug that was fixed today where every rapid game formed by the automatch system was being created as a longer live game, sorry about that. It’s been fixed for a few hours now:
Second, I threw together a quick list of active automatches that could be accepted given the rank restrictions of both players, you’ll find that below the quick match page at the moment.
This isn’t intended to be a final rendition of this information, but with the holiday upon me I didn’t want to release anything too drastic, yet I was curious to see if having this information available would affect queue times and what people chose as their settings. I’m not sure how best to incorporate this information into the interface long term, a list with accept buttons is probably the most straight forward idea but I always felt it seems to go against the simplicity of a quick match interface, that said we might need if we want to be able to match some of the less common settings like 13x13 blitz. If you have any good ideas, please share them.
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One could imagine indicators on or over the corner of the buttons themselves. Some icon like a search icon
<i class="fa-solid fa-magnifying-glass"></i>
to tell you which automatch settings have people queuing.
Except because the settings themselves change with board size, it’s a bit messy that you’d have to show both the search (like) icons on the board sizes as well as imply that these icons only mean for the times shown. You’d have to select 19x19 to see the 19x19 game times and search icons, or the 9x9 icon to see 9x9 times + icons etc.
I also don’t know how you would incorporate the per game handicap setting that way.
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it means “handicap standard” and not “handicap required” ?
Both are displayed like that, I didn’t want to get into trying to communicate preference vs requirement this morning so for the time being both the time setting and handicap setting just show the preference or required setting the same way. I figured if you’re going to try and match their settings it didn’t really matter.
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Yeah, no. It works when the number of open games is not so big. With the open games it will be a clicking race.
Interestingly, presenting a list of automatch games could lead to an undesired behaviour when people would look at the empty list of games and don’t start the automatch.
But your idea with “lucky button” from other thread could work. It is just about the direction of UX improvement. I think the simplicity is in the direction of one button rather than many buttons on the list of games. I think the major, key problem with merged automatch and custom games is game settings. They shouldn’t be too “far” away for automatch to accept the custom games, but I’m not sure how to define this “distance”. E.g., I have no problems with playing rapid with 7 or 3 minutes instead of 5. But what about 0 minutes, or 10/15, that pushes the game to the “live” category - almost.
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its directly from google.com page
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No, it is your idea, live with it 
Geniuses steal from others, you know
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Thanks for this change! It improves things on mobile.
Now if we could just get the list of available games to be on that page. Perhaps after you select what type of game you want, then the available games list becomes visible below your chosen settings, and it scrolls you down to see that list.
This would, I think, also address @ckersch 's feedback
If these are individual games, it would make sense to allow them to be instantly accepted (as @stone.defender suggests); it feels very clunky to try to recreate the combinations of settings manually, hoping for a quick match.
Also I’ve gotten the impression from other commenters that one-click accepting a game for guaranteed no wait time was very popular, so many players are used to it. Whether or not it’s the behavior you want to encourage long term (vs pushing everyone into the blind matchmaking) is another question.
On the other hand, just displaying info (with no accept button) could make sense if instead of individual games, they’re popular categories (i.e. averaged over the past 30min or something) so we at least have a hint of what we could aim for. Of course at that point you could incorporate # of games or estimated wait time more directly into the UI as others have requested.
Final note, it’s not very useful for me to have 9x9 and 13x13 stats when I’m looking for a 19x19 game – maybe at least float the most similar ‘popular’ settings to my current selection to the top of the list, if not filtering based on selection entirely (e.g. again just say expected wait or # of recent games)
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From my understanding, the intention of the matchmaking game queue is to show what settings would result in a quick match being made when you have no preference yourself. Filtering based on your own selection would defeat the purpose.
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sorting indeed would be better than current random
but I think it would be even more better to just write number of waiting people near each settings button instead of in the separate list
near 19x19 sum of all waiting in 19x19
near 9x9 sum of all waiting in 9x9
so you would see more detailed information about settings in current board, but also you would see some information of other boards.
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