8 ms·
100M games played
- edw519 11y agoExcellent site! Congratulations! The only site I ever visit while I work. Whenever I get stuck on something (multiple times per day), I take a lichess break. If I win, I feel better and get back to work. I never lose because as soon as the computer catches me with a fork or a pin, I angrily close my browser and get back to work. Either way it's good.
- ornicar 11y ago"The only site I ever visit while I work." -- edw519 That's the best testimonial I ever read about lichess. Permission to quote requested.
- edw519 11y agoPermission to quote requested. Absolutely.
- eliben 11y ago> The only site I ever visit while I work. You never Google stuff for your work? Never read online reference manuals / docs, like cppreference.com, docs.python.org or whatever language rocks your boat?
- Tinyyy 11y agoI wonder how these kinda models work. I think that over time, while the userbase / costs increases, the donations won't increase as much / decrease. Is this true?
- smandou 11y agoThe website exists for more than 3 years, today we are the 7th of October and the donations are already at 100% for the whole month. It's arguably sustainable enough.
- nothis 11y agoOn a quick glance, I didn't even find a donation button. In fact, I found none, even after clicking through the menus (google sent me here: http://de.lichess.org/donate http://de.lichess.org/donate ).
- cobrabyte 11y agoI'm sure I'm not alone in donating just to ensure that development continues and it remains free for others to use. I don't get a chance to play many games a month but it's nice knowing that others will be able to get better at chess using their platform. Hope it continues to get more higher-ranked players playing there.
- Namidairo 11y agoWow, this actually looks leaps and bounds better than the UX horror that I find Chess.com to be.
- thejosh 11y agoLichess is awesome, and their mobile app (atleast on iOS) is very good as well.
- mrspeaker 11y agoThe punch card graph for the Open Source engine behind Lichess that he wrote is... impressive! https://github.com/ornicar/lila/graphs/punch-card https://github.com/ornicar/lila/graphs/punch-card
- z3t4 11y agoThis whole project is impressive! Programming, community managing, marketing, etc, it seems this guy is working full time on that site. But what is the business plan?
- ornicar 11y agoTo quote happy0: "the plan is to avoid business!" For more info, see http://lichess.org/blog/U4skkUQAAEAAhIGz/why-is-lichess-free http://lichess.org/blog/U4skkUQAAEAAhIGz/why-is-lichess-free Also note that we suck at marketing, but it doesn't matter, since we don't do it at all.
- polym 11y agoHa, I remember that some years ago I've found a silly bug that allowed you to take over white's session and play for him by just changing the url token (lichess.org/<token>). I had my fun for a handful of games, then reported it. Unfortunately, I don't know anymore why or how it worked - Maybe the creator can remember and explain it :). Crazy, how the UX changed over the years. Good job!
- ornicar 11y agoHaha I remember that one! A very, very nasty mistake from me. Lichess was comparing your token to black token, and if it didn't match, it was just assuming that you were the white player. How silly :D I must mention that it was fixed, indeed, years ago.
- unihedron 11y agoLove lichess! Hope to see it grow even bigger soon :) probably 500M games played by new year or so >:P
- giis 11y agoNice, Just now closed lichess tab and opened HN and found this :) Its one of the addictive sites
- mjhoy 11y agoI am thoroughly addicted to watching John Bartholomew's lichess bullet tournaments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIdP7iIsGOU&list=PLl9uuRYQ-6MDiHow7MW8J8E2v16u1etrv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIdP7iIsGOU&list=PLl9uuRYQ-6...
- lhorie 11y agoWow, congrats @ornicar! Is that comment that lichess.org is the second largest chess site on the web true? I was happy to learn of its existence last year when you mentioned on twitter that you were using Mithril.js, and I never realized how big lichess had become since then. Great work!
- ornicar 11y agoAccording to Alexa, it is. And by far. http://chess-links.org/ http://chess-links.org/
- aquateen 11y agoI don't play as much chess that much anymore, but ICC (chessclub.com) was the king (and I'd guess that it still is). You don't play via the website though. Same for other chess servers (FICS, etc).
- Matetricks 11y agoCongrats on all of your progress! I remember being one of the first masters to use Lichess and I absolutely loved it.
- dantillberg 11y agoNice work! Consider it as 100,000,001 games played now on my account. :)
- matthewcanty 11y agoAmazing achievement to have everything running so smooth. Obviously not the site for me as I have no idea how to complete chess captcha!
- softprodigy 11y agoCongrats buddy on your achievement!
- tetraodonpuffer 11y agoI have not played chess for some years, but just wanted to say congratulations especially for making (and keeping!) the site free without the usual upsells and tiered accounts where you get only X problems a day free and so on, thanks for your effort!
- SimplyUseless 11y agoThis is such a great websites. Very impressed as a chess amateur/medium skills that how well the site fits the purpose. Very well done!
- kai_hn 11y agoDoes anyone know a good site to play chinese chess?
- nothis 11y agoGo? I'm half-joking but hey, that would seriously be awesome. Talking mainly about ease of use.
- solidpy 11y agoOr Shogi.
- gamegoblin 11y agoIt would be awesome to have a website that's as easy to use as lichess for xiangqi (chinese chess) and weiqi (go). The existing internet servers for them aren't as full-featured or user friendly.
- Jach 11y agoI've played at https://online-go.com https://online-go.com and it's a much nicer interface than native clients have.
- selestify 11y agoThat's a different game than Chinese chess (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangqi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangqi).
- gamegoblin 11y agoThe comment user Jach was responding to specifically mentions both xianqi (chinese chess) and weiqi (go).
- talideon 11y agoSame goes for Othello/Reversi. A nice server for that would be fantastic!
- wyldfire 11y agoHow is lichess different/better from other chess websites? (I had not heard of the site, I play chess so very rarely).
- ornicar 11y agoWell it's open source (https://github.com/ornicar/lila https://github.com/ornicar/lila), and all features are for free, forever, without any ads. That certainly puts it apart form other chess services I know.
- psuter 11y ago1) The UI+UX is superior, 2) it evolves very quickly, often as a response to user requests, 3) it is entirely free/follows a libre philosophy. The importance of point 3) varies between individuals. Where the competition shines is in the presence of top/titled players, but even there lichess is progressing quickly.
- binarymax 11y agoNow that you have such a huge dataset, do you have any plans to make use of it in interesting ways? For example an opening popularity browser, or a puzzle generator?
- eterm 11y agoThey already use it for a puzzle generator which ranks their own puzzles against players with endgames mined from their games.
- psuter 11y agoThis doesn't require a huge database, but as interesting use, the games are used to generate chess-themed CAPTCHAs, example here: http://en.lichess.org/signup http://en.lichess.org/signup
- yk 11y agoSad to report, that most computers are a lot better at solving that CAPTCHA than I am.
- anExcitedBeast 11y agoThey do really cool stuff with with data, including puzzle generation. lichess is worth checking out.
- nothis 11y agoGod how I love it when there's no login barrier to try. Awesome site!
- amadeusw 11y agoYes! I haven't played chess in years and for me these training sessions are a perfect way to slowly get back into chess.
- cdelsolar 11y agoI'm a tournament Scrabble player and I want to do this for Scrabble. The only choices we have are a very buggy and crappy phone app, made by EA (missing tons of words) that only allows correspondence play, and a client written in something like Java 5 and hosted on some computer in Romania (http://www.isc.ro http://www.isc.ro) to avoid the copyright issue. The latter recently crashed and wiped out about a year of data because presumably the maintainer did not do backups. I can't even use it because I'd have to downgrade Java on my computer. There are great open source tools out there for analyzing/simulating games that can be hooked up to the proposed site (http://quackle.org http://quackle.org for example). Both of the aforementioned programs (the EA one, and ISC) have very elementary analysis with nothing close to look-ahead. I've written a study server at aerolith.org using HTML5/new technologies and am going to add multiplayer soon with Websockets. My time is very limited due to my job, but I'd be willing to help with an effort to recreate something like this amazing site for Scrabble. But again the main issue is the copyright/trademark issue, and the fact that EA has the rights to online Scrabble in North America. If anyone has any ideas it would be awesome.
- dagurp 11y agoWords with friends worked around it by simply using a different name. Also, see this https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/16enap/eli5_why_words_with_friends_is_not_being_sued_by/c7vea2k https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/16enap/e...
- fsiefken 11y agoI came across lichess last year, incredible site with a good stack: Scala, Play framework and mithril.js for the client. Now please implement the top 64 chess variants, like 5x6 chess or chess for 4 players, or modern day abstracts like Dvonn, Arimaa (not AI resistant anymore), Hive, Canon, The Duke, Tash-Kalar, Neuroshima Hex or Taj Mahal.
- ajkjk 11y agoI play on Chess.com a lot. I want to move to Lichess - in large part because it doesn't spam me with requests to sign up - but the matchmaking system is much harder to use. On Chess.com I can log on and click a "find me a 10+0 game" and I just get a game. On Lichess, as far as I can tell, I have to scan the list of games, compare them to my rating (which I can't even see on the main screen, and don't trust at all since it swung +150 points on my first game..), and then pick from the list. It's a huge mental barrier on "playing a quick game of chess". I also really wish that the chess UI on lichess showed me what pieces each player had captured. It seems to.. sometimes.. but not always, which is confusing. They constantly disappear. Also, the pieces that show up above/below the move list on the right side both appear as black pieces (when they actually show up), rather than of the appropriate color, so the display could be read as both "pieces you have captured" and "pieces you have lost". I'm sure I could get used to this but it's confusing as a new user.
- tvelichkov 11y ago"On Lichess, as far as I can tell, I have to scan the list of games, compare them to my rating (which I can't even see on the main screen, and don't trust at all since it swung +150 points on my first game..), and then pick from the list." Or you can just host a game and wait for someone to find you?
- ornicar 11y agoIndeed. Lichess also does autopairing, so when someone else creates a 10+10 game, you'll get paired without anyone needing to scan the seek list.
- ajkjk 11y agoI haven't used Lichess much, so I hadn't discovered this. It's not very obvious as far as I can tell. I hope that it would also do matchmaking approximately based on rating? (Though, as I mentioned, I still don't trust my rating at all since my first ranked win gave me 150 rating points. Chess.com's give closer to 8-20, as I recall, which is much more credible. Specifically, I don't trust that my rating varied by 150 in one game, but the range of ratings I see on the front page is only about 1500-1800.. so it seems as though I just skipped almost the entire range in a single game.)
- tboerstad 11y agoThanks a lot for a great service! Did not know it was just a single developer, I'd much rather donate to this than pay for ICC. In fact I just did.
- krisdol 11y agoPlease fix your content load priorities, or sub a standard font before the web font is ready. This is how the page looks for the first 8 seconds on mobile: http://m.imgur.com/rKmzqvJ http://m.imgur.com/rKmzqvJ
- sireat 11y agolichess has a nice clean interface and it is a joy to play on it and also it is nice to have easily exportable games (i am looking at you chess.com!) The one problem with everything free philosophy and relying on donations is that top players are unlikely to play on the site (see FICS vs ICC battles of early 90s where ICC by paying and giving affiliate sales quickly rose to be the dominant force in early net chess despite the questionable morality of taking over original ICS). This presents a problem for someone who has problems getting a good game on lichess. At 2400 on lichess, I either have to play masses of 2100-2200s or computer cheaters. As an FM I've played a few FMs and I think one IM on lichess. On commercial sites (the top 3 being chess.com, ICC, and Playchess) there are incentives to bring in GM caliber players. Again, if you just want a good amateur game, then lichess is a fine choice.