Zoë Blade's notebook

Lichess

Lichess
Lichess

Lichess is a free chess server and registered charity. Unlike commercial chess servers, it doesn't have any adverts, nor any membership fees. Donations are accepted, but by no means required.

Learning chess

There's a whole "Learn" section that teaches you everything you need to know to play chess well. This runs the whole gamut, from how the pieces move, through to various endgame checkmating techniques, along with tactics like forking, skewering, and pinning.

The effect is quite similar to reading a book like Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess, only it's interactive, guiding you along the way. It may well have made such books obsolete on a practical level, although I have a fondness for them, and it can be nice to get away from a computer screen every now and then.

There's also a "global opening explorer", basically an interactive encyclopedia of openings.[1]

Playing games

When it comes to actually playing chess, the site's generally very helpful, its settings giving you the option to show you when your King's in check, and to show which moves each piece is allowed to make. The only omission of help to neophytes I can see is that when one of your pieces is absolutely pinned, you rightly can't move it, but no explanation is given as to why, leaving you to figure it out yourself.

Even the material difference can be calculated and shown as a concise summary, although at first it wasn't very clear to me that it was just the difference. In other words, what looks like a list of captured pieces set off to the side actually omits any pieces that have been equally captured from both sides, showing only the difference between the two sides.[2] In true hacker spirit, it's a wealth of features and togglable options, and a dearth of easily found documentation.

Lichess even supports several chess variants, including Chess960.

I think it's also worth mentioning that you can select your favourite style of both chessmen and board. While seemingly a superficial luxury, I personally find moving around pictures of turned and whittled Staunton chessmen to be much more intuitive than moving the kind of flat icons found in newspapers and books, requiring less "translating" in my mind. I hope one day they'll add other physical styles of chessmen. Now that would be a luxury.

Analysing games

After each game, you can ask the system to analyse what you could have done better. The microscope icon takes you to the analysis board, where you can request a computer analysis that points out all your inaccuracies, mistakes, and blunders. From there, you can ask to learn from your mistakes, which replays specific points in the game and asks you to consider what you could have done differently, providing hints if needed. You can even analyse your opponent's moves, and other people's games. This is very much a twenty-first century way of rapidly improving at chess.

There are also countless annotated games available to replay, such as various World Chess Championship matches, from the first in 1886, through to the latest.[3]

Solving puzzles

Solving puzzles is a great way to improve your chess pattern recognition. Here, too, Lichess has you covered, with literally millions of them. They're all from real games, interactive, and grouped by type.[4] This essentially makes chess puzzle books obsolete.

For example, I recommend practicing mate-in-one puzzles until they no longer present a significant challenge, then moving on to mate-in-two. Lichess currently has over six hundred thousand of each of these, enough to keep you going for a while. The puzzles are ranked just like players, so you'll automatically see puzzles appropriate to your current abilities.

Downloading data

Lichess is very much made in the open source philosophy.[5] You're free to create an account, play unlimited chess games with hundreds of thousands of people[6] all over the world, download your and other people's games — over six billion of them — as standard PGN files, download the server software itself, and generally copy and use anything you want in any way you want. Great news for programmers and data hoarders alike.

When you make billions of chess games freely available, people find interesting uses for them. For example, someone wrote a handy script to highlight the most interesting games, by various criteria.[7] You want to see someone winning despite having less material, or a Knight attacking a whopping seven pieces at once, including the King? No problem!

Lichess considers all chess games to be in the public domain,[8] so be warned that every game you play can be linked to and downloaded by anyone for posterity. Admittedly, being a weak chess player isn't exactly shameful, and neither is having the occasional off-day.

Conclusion

For chess enthusiasts, Lichess is a convenient way to play as many games of chess as you like, against hundreds of thousands of people automatically and dynamically selected to be roughly as good at the game as you are, for free, with no adverts.

For gamers, it's an online turn-based strategy game that's easy to learn and played all over the world. It doesn't require the latest graphics card, nor a high-grade Internet connection. At the classical pace, it can be comfortably played with a lag time that stretches into whole seconds. It doesn't run the risk of going out of fashion or being unsupported next year. As with all games that predate the twentieth century, you don't need to frequently buy and learn new expansion packs in a commercial dystopia reminiscent of Brave New World. Six different characters, roaming around a single level consisting of an 8×8 grid of squares, is all you're ever getting. Having said that, several variations are available if you like that sort of thing.

To the programmer, it offers a tantalising dataset to explore,[8] and a codebase to build upon, as several communities already have — see Lidraughts and Lishogi.

I recommend it to all three groups of people... especially those who simply want to play a nice game of chess.

References

  1. "Opening Explorer" Lichess
  2. "I Can't See the Pieces I Captured" mkubecek, Lichess
  3. "Chess World Championships" Lichess
  4. "Puzzle Themes" Lichess
  5. "I Started Lichess, Ask Me Anything" Thibault Duplessis, Reddit
  6. "January was a month of records for Lichess 🎉" @lichess, Twitter, Feb 2023
  7. "ChessFactory: Hall of Fame"
  8. "lichess.org Open Database"

Further reading

Deep dives

Chess: Chess set | Elo rating system | Lichess | Tactic