Lichess - Don't register. Play Chess. | Hacker News Reader

Lichess - Don't register. Play Chess.

lichess.org

174 pointsUncle_Sam56 comments

Please don't tell me Safari 5 is deprecated and ask me to "upgrade" to Firefox.

Especially on the iPhone!

Look on the bright side. At least the page doesn't say something like "Works best on Internet Explorer 4" (or some other outdated version of IE).

I don't see how that would be much worse. You're requiring one specific version of one specific browser either way.

How to troll online chess:

1. Open up Chess.app

2. Turn CPU difficulty all the way up

3. Start lichess game as black

4. Mirror lichess opponent's moves into Chess.app

5. Mirror Chess.app opponent's moves into lichess

6. Talk incredible amounts of smack

Also, I would like to make a lichess.org bot that plays chess and intelligently talks to opponents.

Sounds a lot more fun than making a poker bot.

Don't forget to analyse moves and comment on them. It makes it more realistic.

You are watching a stranger play chess against a computer. There has to be a more fulfilling method of trolling people.

Or both of them are watching two computers playing against each other.

I suspect the enjoyable part was step 6.

It's more of a challenge, (and more fun) doing this with a real-life chess game. A friend and I challenged a buddy who was good at chess to a game (2 vs 1), a scenario which he usually defeated us in. I had to leave the room to enter his moves onto my desktop machine. The fun was making up excuses for leaving the room, and transmitting the moves to my partner without making it look suspicious (I pretended to be wired up on caffeine and extremely jumpy). "We" managed to defeat him quickly, but, after seeing how dissapointed he was, spilled the beans.

Awesome! I love that Chess 960 (aka Fischer Random) is a prominent choice.

It's a variant of chess where the back rank with all the pieces on it are in a random order (although the board is mirrored, so each side has their pieces in the same order).

My brother is a strong chess player, but eventually gave up the game because to improve he was having to spend more and more time memorizing opening lines. With chess 960 there are 960 different starting positions, so memorization doesn't help at all. I hope it gets more popular, it's a more purely strategic and tactical than standard chess.

That's really interesting. Do you know of any tournaments or communities that purely play that way? If so, did your brother consider moving to them rather than giving it up altogether? How old was your brother when he quit and how strong is "strong"?

He'd been scholastic state chess champion a couple times in a row and stuff. I think he was rated ~2000 USCF when he lost interest; I'm not sure how old he was -- probably late teens.

I don't know of any tournaments or communities with a major focus on chess 960, but that doesn't mean there aren't any out there. If you're looking to play, you can probably find matches on ICC (http://www.chessclub.com/help/Fischer-random). It's not free, unfortunately.

I was positively surprised by the fact that the site presented itself in my native language (polish) and it didn't suck. It's probably the first time ever I saw a site that autodetected a language and it actually felt nice. Not everything is translated though, and I hope you'll fix it one day :).

Disappointed. I got paired with a newbie who was screwing around.

http://awesomescreenshot.com/0fa3r9l09

The site, though, is beautiful and a joy to play on. My last online chess was at Yahoo Chess, and this feels like walking on air compared to Y! Chess's clunky interface. Beautiful site, very pleasing to use.

A nice feature to keep semi-serious players around would be some way to get scored or sorted, so you somewhat consistently can get decent matches. Overall I really like it though, cheers.

Edit: Got a full game in - http://lichess.org/bsba_b - I was black. Made some mistakes, I'm rusty. But the interface is really a joy, I like it a lot.

Yahoo chess still eh? You should try out chesscube. It's much much better.

Could this be the reason that registration would be a better idea, and thus explain the success of all the chess servers that require it? I'd much prefer to play against an evenly matched opponent, or with a stronger player who I can learn from by analysing the game with afterwards - and definitely against someone who will finish the game. Both of these things requires reputation, and reputation requires registration. I found fics to be great for this.

I apologise to whoever I annoyed by not even playing the first move. I wanted to see if there were _any_ options to discriminate my opponent (for example by supplying my own rating on an honour system); there were none.

It is nice, I agree that there should be some sort of difficulty level to select. I got paired with someone much better than I and lost pretty quickly. I am not a total newbie, but I'm far from being good :)

Here's a replay of me playing someone who outclasses and outplays me in every way but becomes overconfident and makes a careless mistake that costs him/her the game. I find it amusing because I don't imagine it being common for a weak player to beat a stronger opponent.

http://lichess.org/analyse/pvpxyq

Once again I make no claim on my ability to play the game of chess. (I suck) This was more luck than anything but it's a good example of how you shouldn't give up/become too cocky before crossing the finish line.

fyi, Black is also not a very strong player.

It's also usually worth playing for a statemate when you're too far behind... the chances of it happening seem so slim that the opponent just goes into cruise control.

A similar see-sawing battle that's also nicely explained: http://chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=6820

I've been thinking about doing this for a while. There's so many times when I want to play a game of chess with a friend online, but don't want to take the time to register an account at any of the big chess sites.

My idea would have been a service where you click "New Game", it generates a unique link which you then give to your friend.

Anyways, incredibly well done.

FTR: Lichess does this, visit http://lichess.org/friend

I still prefer to download a standalone client and connect to FICS and choose time controls, opponents, etc...

I prefer FICS too, compared to web alternatives like lichess, you also get a glicko rating, history, win-loss count, lag stats, and you can find a game in an instant, as well as chat functionality and more.

The FICS database of games is also available on: http://www.ficsgames.com/ - currently hosts about 120 million games in its archive.

Best client for FICS is Babaschess - http://www.babaschess.net/default.asp

Have you tried Chess.com?

This is nice. I was a little saddened that the replay and analyse option after games did not actually analyse games, but with the export I can download the games into my favourite chess engine and have it analyse the games for me.

[edit: noticed that there is a forum, don't go there. While someone occasionally posts an interesting game like http://lichess.org/analyse/0mbole the level of conversation is roughly what you'd expect from a 4chan /chess/ board.]

A Lichess is a female Lich.

How many D&D scenarios have you play a game of chess against a Lich?

Sometimes, I feel it worthwhile to waste karma on these musings. Daydream more often.

I came in here to make the same point, though I too was pondering the karma hit. Have an upvote.

To drag another tangential fantasy/sci-fi reference into the discussion, in an episode of Blake's 7 Avon and Vila smuggled their supercomputer Orac into a space casino so Vila could play against The Klute, a wizened Davros-like house chess genius with a terrifying laugh. The prize for winning or drawing was 10 million space credits, lose and The Klute could choose your destruction.

Sayonara karma.

Didn't that episode end ironically, with the Federation taking over the planet and rendering the currency they'd just won worthless?

Did the server go down? I want to play against the machine, all I get is a page not found/404 page. I'm on Firefox.

Anything similar for Go?

http://go.davepeck.org/

Not bad at all as far as interface goes, but their timer is buggy. In 5 0 it ate 15 seconds of my time, apparently due to lag. A thought I had for a while: do analysis on games as they occur and try to estimate opponents' strength, as a way to detect cheating of the type where one of the players mimics a computer. Computationally expensive, but would be fun to try.

Nice. I like not having to register. Thanks!!

Nice, but I hit a bug where the other guy couldn't see my move. We both thought it was the other person's turn :(

I like it very much, it's fun to use, but do sth with the performance. At the moment "149 connected players" and it's hanging. It's 3rd game in a row for me when it's hanging once a few moves, now it's dead completely. Game over :(

Love it! visuals are nice but can be improved. wooden board, 3D pieces etc.

Before matching players in a random game, ask for a level like novice, intermediate and pro.

I like the chess roulette idea...

“Visuals are nice but can be improved. wooden board, 3D pieces etc.”

You would call that improved and I would call that tacky.

one man's tackyness is another's beauty

http://www.tchessgame.com/ss/ipad_main.png

http://www.tchessgame.com/ss/ipad_editposition.png

http://www.tchessgame.com/ss/ipad_analysis.png

But what do I know about design? A mere coder...

Castling on the queen's side is very clunky. If you move the king two spaces, it should castle for you. It works just fine on the king's side, though.

I await chessroulette: lichess + video of your opponent.

While I was playing I couldn't find the clock

OK, I see the clock now but it doesn't work like the traditional one, I played a 5 min "blitz" game and I would have like 5:05, is it using perhaps the Fisher's clock?

GitHub repository: https://github.com/ornicar/lichess

Hmph:

> "Anonymous - The other player has left the game. You can force resignation, or wait for him."

Got sexism much?

Freechess.org lets you choose your interface, and has a ton of quality opponents.

Still, it's unfriendly to newbies. You need to learn console commands. Also, the registration process does not allow webmail addresses. On places like chess.com or chesscube, you can pretty much start right away.

That said, I still prefer FICS for the greater flexibility in timings and the ability to review all past games.

How can you offer a draw?

This is one of those ideas I feel like I should have thought of.

not bad but i prefer chess.com

Very nice!

Seems to be down now. :\

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