Lichess founder Thibault Duplessis lectures on Lichess (2017)

The best chess website in the universe. Totally free. Zero ads. Everything is perfect, and forever it will become more perfect, thanks to Thibault Duplessis. He lives in France and he's an atheist.

About lichess.org

lichess.org is a free/libre, open-source chess server powered by volunteers and donations.

In 2010, Thibault Duplessis began work on Lichess as a hobby project. The site was simple at the beginning, not even checking to see if moves were legal. He made the site open source, which means anyone is free to read the source code and make contributions. Gradually, the site improved and collected users as an enthusiastic volunteer staff assembled to help Thibault build and maintain the site.

Today, Lichess users play more than a million games every day. Lichess is one of the most popular chess websites in the world while remaining 100% free. Most “free” websites subsist by selling ads or selling user data. Others do it by putting all the good stuff behind paywalls. Lichess does none of these things and never will. With no investors demanding profits, Lichess staff can focus on improving the site as their only goal.

Despite Lichess's humble origins, playing a chess game is far from the only thing you can do on Lichess. After finishing a game, you can request computer analysis using the latest Stockfish chess engine and learn from your mistakes or compare your game against a massive database of chess masters’ games. You can watch top players battle it out live and discuss the game with your friends; even World Champions play on Lichess! Players wishing to improve can hire a coach and use real-time collaborative “studies” to share games, positions, annotated variations and chat.

A site the size of Lichess requires many people to maintain it. It also requires money to pay for servers and other hosting services. The number of people who have contributed to these things is difficult to count precisely, but they fall into the following categories:

• Lichess would not exist without the thousands of hours of time from volunteers, both from developers, who create new features and/or fix bugs, and our administrative team, who police the site and help with long-term vision.
• Patrons provide a steady stream of income to our site, sufficient to run our servers and handle expenses.
• Finally, the players who come to Lichess to have fun, relax and learn, without whom this would all be pointless!

This is the guy from France who created Lichess.org (the best chess website in the universe). He takes drugs, he's a communist, and he's an atheist. His chess website will last thousands of years. He is the most brilliant person on this planet.

 Thibault Duplessis

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Benevolent dictator of lichess.org, a hippie communist chess server for drug fueled atheists.

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Official website

Wikipedia - Lichess

Lichess (/ˈliːtʃɛs/^[4]) is a free and open-source Internet chess server run by a non-profit organization of the same name. Anyone can play anonymously, although players may register an account on the site to play rated games. Lichess is ad-free and all the features are available for free, as the site is funded by donations.^[5][6][7]

Contents

• 1History
• 2Features
• 3See also
• 4References
• 5External links

History[edit]

Lichess was founded by French programmer Thibault Duplessis.^[8] The software running Lichess and the design are open source under the AGPL license.^[9]

On February 11, 2015, an official Lichess mobile app was released for Android devices.^[10] An app for mobile devices running iOS was released on March 4, 2015.^[11]

As of June 8, 2020, lichess.org had a global rank of 1,207 at Alexa, with most of its visitors coming from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, and Canada.^[12] According to the Alexa rank, Lichess is ranked second only to Chess.com as one of the most popular internet chess servers in the world.^[13]

Being ad-free, Lichess relies on donated money to maintain over a dozen servers with over a hundred processor cores while paying programmers.^[14]

Features[edit]

The website allows users to play games of live and correspondence chess against other players at different time controls. It has training features, including chess basics, tactics training, chess coordinates, a chess video library, an opening explorer, studies, and a analysis board.^[15][16] It also has a section where chess coaches can advertise their services to users.^[17]

In addition to enabling blindfold chess,^[18] the website supports the following chess variants:^[19]

• Antichess (Losing chess)
• Atomic chess^[20]
• Chess960 (Fischer Random Chess)
• Crazyhouse ^[21]
• Horde (a variant of Dunsany's chess)
• King of the Hill
• Racing Kings
• Three-check chess

Lichess was the first chess-site to have features to help visually impaired people play chess on a website.^[22][23] It also has a chess puzzle-based CAPTCHA system.^[24][25]

Users can also play games against the Stockfish chess engine at a number of difficulty levels.^[26] They may also analyze specific positions from standard chess or any of the supported chess variants. The website implements a version of the Stockfish engine that runs on the user's local machine within the user's web browser for limited or infinite analysis,^[27] which will calculate best lines of play or major opponent threats. An opening book based on games played on the site or a database of two million games played by FIDE titled players is available.^[28] In Antichess variant, users can switch for Mark Watkins's antichess solution database.^[29]

For registered players, Lichess employs a rating system, and grants the ability to compete in tournaments, post in the forums, and request a server-side full game analysis for any finalized game. The ratings for standard chess are categorized into Ultrabullet, Bullet, Blitz, Rapid, or Classical, depending on the game's total time or estimated total time (if using Fischer time control which increments time after each move).

A Lichess mobile app is available for iOS and Android.^[30]

In December 2017 Lichess began hosting a monthly Titled Arena for titled players featuring some of the best players in the world playing bullet chess. Magnus Carlsen won the first titled arena under his Mangus Carlsbong account, DannyTheDonkey.^[31] Magnus would go on to win nearly every titled arena he played in.

Lichess