Table of contents
Lichess
The complete chess experience, play and compete in tournaments with friends others around the world.
As Lichess is an open source project, you can find more
open source alternatives and stats
on LibHunt.
Free to Use
Lichess is completely free to use, with no hidden fees or subscription models required to access its features.
Open Source
The platform is open-source, allowing anyone to contribute to its development or customize it according to their needs.
Ad-Free
Lichess does not run advertisements, providing a cleaner and more enjoyable user experience.
Variants
Offers a wide range of chess variants like Crazyhouse, Chess960, and Atomic, catering to diverse player interests.
Community Features
Features strong community elements such as forums, tournaments, and team play, enhancing social interaction.
Analysis Tools
Provides powerful game analysis tools, including Stockfish integration, to help players improve their skills.
Accessibility
The platform has a clean and intuitive interface that is accessible to both beginners and experienced players.
Mobile Apps
Lichess offers mobile applications for both iOS and Android, allowing users to play and learn chess on the go.
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Lichess.org is an excellent platform for playing, learning, and improving in chess. It provides a high-quality, ad-free experience that is accessible to everyone, making it a favorite among many chess players worldwide.
We have collected here some useful links to help you find out if Lichess is good.
Check the traffic stats of Lichess on SimilarWeb. The key metrics to look for are: monthly visits, average visit duration, pages per visit, and traffic by country. Moreoever, check the traffic sources. For example "Direct" traffic is a good sign.
Check the "Domain Rating" of Lichess on Ahrefs. The domain rating is a measure of the strength of a website's backlink profile on a scale from 0 to 100. It shows the strength of Lichess's backlink profile compared to the other websites. In most cases a domain rating of 60+ is considered good and 70+ is considered very good.
Check the "Domain Authority" of Lichess on MOZ. A website's domain authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). It is based on a 100-point logarithmic scale, with higher scores corresponding to a greater likelihood of ranking. This is another useful metric to check if a website is good.
The latest comments about Lichess on Reddit. This can help you find out how popualr the product is and what people think about it.
Hi HN! I build this project to explore an idea I got in mind for a long time : Is transformer a suitable architecture for a chess bot? I built a small model (11M parameters) and trained it on human games (Elite Lichess DB). Model alone is performing around 1500 elo, but I built an harness using Monte Carlos Tree Search (MCTS) using my model heuristics to improve the model to ~2100 elo (evaluated against... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago
Lichess is incredibly well optimized [0] (and an amazing public service). I'm sure that this is very cost effective for TTT, so a win-win. [0] https://lichess.org/@/revoof/blog/optimizing-the-tablebase-server/MetV0ZQd. - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
Https://lichess.org/@/Lichess/blog/lichess-and-take-take-take-sign-cooperation-agreement/DZS0S0Dy. - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
The actual blogpost: https://lichess.org/@/Lichess/blog/op1-partial-8-piece-tablebase-available/1ptPBDpC On a related note, anyone knows a Mastodon proxy that doesn't require JS and I can just pipe links through? - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
Lichess uses a scheme which is probably more efficient on average, described on revoof's blog[0]. Basically, it's a variable length scheme where the first 64 bits encode square occupancies, followed by piece codes (including castling, side to move, and ep with some trickery), followed by half-move clocks if necessary. 0:... - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
To extend this to entire game histories, here's the Lichess blog post, "Compressing Chess Moves Even Further, To 3.7 Bits Per Move": https://lichess.org/@/marcusbuffett/blog/compressing-chess-moves-even-further-to-37-bits-per-move/YgugQc42. - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
Dedicated servers on a host like Hetzer and OVH surely beats any virtualization based cloud offering on price and performance. The tradeoff is availability. It's a great choice for entities that are optimizing on cost, but not a great choice if your business cannot tolerate downtime. A good example is a the big lichess outage from last year [1]. Lichess is a non-profit, and also must serve a huge user base. Given... - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago
Https://lichess.org/@/Tobs40/blog/there-is-no-reachable-chess-position-with-more-than-218-moves/a5xdxeqs#checking-more-positions-to-make-things-less-slow describes how the author removed some more complicated rules in the first pass, and is willing to re-introduce them, if necessary. Ie if the solution found violates them. Interestingly, mixed integer linear programming solvers already support these. The... - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
Chess, I play on Lichess[1]. I started about a year and a half ago. [1]: https://lichess.org/. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
Very interesting, I have been actually working on an AI Chess Coach to help explain moves of games: https://lichess.org/@/nightfox/blog/ai-chess-coach/4uMrWhR9. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
I'm a big chess buff, and will say that the hard part is not making an engine (which is hard!), but making an engine that plays poorly, well. What I mean is: engines are very smart and better than the best human. When you make a "dumb" engine, you are telling a chess god to intentionally make mistakes. The mistakes they make, however, are not the same mistakes a beginner chess player would make. Today, beginners... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
Read about it more here: https://lichess.org/@/Neodimi/blog/playquoridor-a-free-open-source-real-time-quoridor-server/qHDnpxlq. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
Zen mode is a popular UX pattern that creates a distraction-free experience for application users. It's a simple approach where part of application interface is hidden on user's demand. I have encountered this mode in applications where the main functions are based on focus and tranquility. One of them is Lichess, the second chess platform in the World. I am a chess enthusiast and I am trying (with poor results)... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
Https://lichess.org is an excellent open source chess server with plenty of learning resources for pure beginners. As you progress learning resources sadly get more and more expensive indeed. Not to mention the cost of tournaments (travel and accomodation expenses add up very quickly). - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
You don't have a good grasp of data analysis then. You used the data to tell yourself a story "the experts are biased!, not to gain a real deeper understanding". This story should already be suspect because the experts, when commentating, had access to the data you looked at. The eval bar was always there. But they interpreted it. Your assumption seems to be that by calculating some trivial statistics and not... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
This is about eval nuance, not how bots play Bots playing like humans is done by training them to play like humans: https://lichess.org/@/lichess/blog/introducing-maia-a-human-like-neural-network-chess-engine/X9PUixUA. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
Best place to play chess is still https://lichess.org/ !! - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
Here's a quick anonymous game against it by me, where I obliterate the poor thing in 11 moves. I was around a 1500 ELO classical strength player, which is, a teeny bit above average, globally. But I mean - not an expert, or even one of the "strong" club players (in any good club). https://lichess.org/BRceyegK -- the game, you'll see it make the ultimate classic opening errors https://lichess.org/ -- try yourself!... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
> I wonder if another mechanism altogether could work a bit better -- a matrix of electromagnets embedded under the board, with a resolution of say 1/4", so that when deployed in sequence, they could move the pieces from one magnetic field to another and another, without any actual moving parts involved. A standard chessboard has squares of 2-2.5โ, so this would require at least 4096 electromagnets. There was a... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
> lichess only record moves with one-second accuracy According to this blog post, this hasn't been correct since at least 2017: https://lichess.org/@/lichess/blog/a-better-game-clock-history/WOEVrjAA "Move times are now stored and displayed with a precision of one tenth of a second. The precision even goes up to one hundredth of a second, for positions where the player had less than 10 seconds left on... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
It is hard. Lichess admins are highly skilled and I'm sure they already have a well designed infrastructure. You can see what they use at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Si3PMUJGR9KrpE5lngSkHLJKJkb0ZuI4/preview The issue was on a network equipment that they didn't even manage. You can't load balance when your core network is down. There was nothing they could do as I understand it. More details at:... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
Lichess, pronounced "lee-chess," is a popular online chess platform that stands out in public opinion for its unique approach to providing a comprehensive, community-driven chess experience. Unlike its primary competitor, Chess.com, Lichess is recognized for its open-source foundation, which has contributed to its reputation for transparency and community involvement.
One of the most appreciated aspects of Lichess is its focus on accessibility and fairness, a sentiment echoed across various user discussions. The platform is entirely free, without ads, as it's funded by donations, which users often cite as a significant advantage over subscription-based services like Chess.com. This financial model underscores the platform's commitment to inclusivity, allowing chess enthusiasts globally to enjoy high-level chess tools without financial barriers.
In terms of features, Lichess offers a robust set of tools for players at all levels. Its "Zen mode," for example, is praised for providing a distraction-free gaming environment, helping users focus purely on their chess games. Moreover, Lichess is commended for its AI capabilities, particularly the Maia chess engine, which attempts to mimic human play to provide more relatable training experiences for players. This human-like AI offers a more practical learning experience for beginners, addressing a common critique in AI development where engines typically play too perfectly even when attempting to simulate lower-level play.
Lichess is also acclaimed for its educational resources, such as interactive tutorials and puzzles, which are beneficial for players looking to improve. However, some users have noted that as they advance, they tend to face higher costs when participating in external tournaments, an issue unrelated to the platform itself but relevant to the broader chess ecosystem.
From a technical perspective, discussions around Lichess's infrastructure highlight its resilience and the competence of its administrative team. The platform's downtime scenarios are generally well-managed and communicated transparently, earning it respect within the tech-savvy segments of its user base.
Despite its strengths, Lichess does face challenges in user perception, particularly when compared to Chess.com. Notably, there's a ongoing debate regarding rating comparisons. Lichess's rating system is different from Chess.com's, leading to frequent discussions about their relative merit and how they translate into player skill levels. The consensus often recognizes that rating systems are inherently subjective, though Lichess is typically praised for its straightforward and consistent rating structure.
Overall, public opinion portrays Lichess as a modern, egalitarian platform championing accessibility and community involvement, with a technical backbone that highlights its independence and open-source values. As it continues to evolve, Lichess remains a cherished tool for chess players worldwide due to its price model, feature set, and dedication to fostering an inclusive chess community.
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Is Lichess good? This is an informative page that will help you find out. Moreover, you can review and discuss Lichess here. The primary details have not been verified within the last quarter, and they might be outdated. If you think we are missing something, please use the means on this page to comment or suggest changes. All reviews and comments are highly encouranged and appreciated as they help everyone in the community to make an informed choice. Please always be kind and objective when evaluating a product and sharing your opinion.
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