Garry Kasparov launches a community-first chess platform
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
My only complaint is how it's pronounced. Can't help but think of leeches.
Too much fantasy here and “lichess” makes me think of a female lich.
Well financed commercial players like chess.com, chess24, chessbase were never able to replicate it. Lichess which was a one man show for a long time has beaten them all in engineering department and not by a small margin. The difference is just night and day, like driving 30 years old car and modern one.
It's one of the examples of how you can't pay your way to good software. There was a discussion about Discord lately and how it's about userbase only and how you could recreate it spending a fraction of what its valuation is. I don't think you could. I mean apparently you can't even pay your way to get somewhat playable chess site.
Btw, check the git log (or run one if those punch card scripts on the repo). The main programmer is a machine. It's humbling what kind of output a great programmer with great work ethics can achieve.
chess24's default chess board is easier on the eyes than the flat design lichess one.
lichess is amazing for playing though.
It reminds me of Dwarf Fortress. Admittedly, DF is not open source, but it's free with a wonderful community and a very transparent development process supported by donations.
But I have to agree that Lichess is an absolute jewel of the chess community, and I’m a happy supporter of it. We don’t need another chess matchmaking site, but it doesn’t sound like Kasparov is trying to compete in that space.
The UX is just perfect.
It is an inspiration for me.
With everyone else, I'm very happy to be limited to "GL", "HF", "Thanks", "Bye" (localized to their language of choice).
I'm also not trying to make friends/community on lichess, its not like WoW or Dota where teams matter to the actual game. Historically, chess teams existed because of geographical boundaries. People needed other chess players of a similar level to: 1. get better at chess, 2. amortize the costs of traveling to a tournament, 3. try to estimate their global ranking to satisfy ego.
Players on the same chess teams happened to become very good friends because of the time commitment to the game and therefore each other. Eventually the friendships were the more important commitment. However, with lichess (or just the internet in general), I can satisfy all 3 benefits of having a chess team by playing alone on lichess and have really great friends orthogonal of chess (especially since travel isn't part of my chess hobby's time commitment).
lichess: non-profit, free and open source, community oriented, high quality tech, growing userbase, amazing founder ornicar, much loved by its users and supporters including me. Regular online competitions well attended but doesn't organise major events. Doesn't really do things like video lessons or partnership with streamers as far as I know, probably due to non-profit status and community focus.
chess.com: for-profit, the largest user base, led by IM Danny Rensch. Tech is not as good as lichess but still okay-ish. Organises major events with GM commentators. Has partnerships with major streamers, such as the most successful (but controversial) US number 2 GM Hikaru Nakamura. I used to support them before lichess got big.
chess24: for-profit, led by GM Jan Gustaffson, much smaller than chess.com and lichess, supported by current world champion GM Magnus Carlsen. Tech is worse than both lichess and chess.com. Also organises important events, and also produces high quality content such as video lessons. I'm considering supporting them too as I watch a lot of their content but I just enjoy playing on lichess too much.
One fascinating thing is how both for-profit chess.com and chess24 have much worse tech than non-profit lichess despite presumably large budgets. For example chess24 platform has been under development for years and has become a running joke even for its employees. You'd think a chess website would be fairly simple tech in the grand scheme of things but clearly it's still hard to do it right. A testament to how impressive lichess founder and community is.
Wikipedia can tell you about which the leaders of chess.com are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess.com
Basically lichess > chess.com > chess24 in the playing surface
He's been putting his name on stuff for years.
But Queens Gambit did push chess to be even more popular.
There's also pretty substantial evidence the later parts of the boom were fed by COVID.
"On March 19, 2019, Netflix gave the production a series order consisting of six episodes"
https://socialblade.com/twitch/user/gmhikaru/monthly https://socialblade.com/twitch/user/chessbrah/monthly
And I say that as someone who was watching Hiarku on twitch in 2018 and even wrote long post on this site about why Chess is the fastest growing esport" in 2019. [ I seem to have lost which account I posted that under however, I maintain separate work accounts and suspect I posted that one one company time (oops!) ]
But looking back, I was over-optimistic, not about Chess' prospects as an esport, but about how much it had really grown given what happened when we saw a real boom from the pandemic, from xQc and pogchamps, and from the Queen's Gambit.
This surprises me, could someone expand a bit on this? I've only ever heard chess referred to positively in popular culture. I would assume most non chess players' understanding of chess is based on idioms like "thinking N moves ahead" and "playing 4D chess."
(I'm not sure I'd consider Beth Harmon a shining example of psychological stability either...)
That said, I grew up as a chess nerd and although I knew vaguely that Bobby Fischer was a tragic figure (largely thanks to "In Search of Bobby Fischer", despite the movie having almost nothing to do with the titular character), I'd never heard of that association with chess in general.
All in all, I think that was a pretty silly charge. His violation was wanting to play chess in Yugoslavia. The only tragedy there is US foreign policy, not some "crime" that he committed.
Which doesn't mean it's going to fail. It just means that there's nothing new about it. It's all about good execution and management, and nothing about innovation, like I feel this article tries to paint it.
I’m pretty happy he is making a platform like this, it’s bound to be excellent.
honestly I really hope that I'm entirely wrong about the man's life and success, but at the very least I'm convinced that Kasparov has never associated with the best available public relations and marketing minds, certainly no one equal to his genius for the game.
http://www.hastingschess.com/congress-history/
my apologies if I received a very early impression from Kasparov by the fact that he most certainly made a impression on my youth but disappointed greatly by ignoring the nearest and most wonderful setting where nobody else was above competing in.
But as it stands, I can only pre-register. For a chance to be one of 6400 players granted early access.
but I can only say that I really would have felt very hurt by this limitation if I could transplant my childhood me to today. I have such a distinctive memory of the way I felt about arbitrarily elitist and opaque barriers to intellectual pursuit.
I'm not doing a very good job expressing myself probably because I have such a clear recollection of the way I was as a kid, but I think that my earlier comment about how better PR and marketing would be a help with Kasparov's image when you consider this limitation remains opaque in functional reality even if the reason of the limit is clear any inquiring mind has to ask why not take it more slowly / soft launch, as you suggested, or if something else isn't quite there yet.
I wanted to share a fascinating insight into Kasparov that Mig wrote to Edward Winter in April 2005:
"A few words regarding your interesting note about Garry Kasparov and his retirement. While I don’t disagree with the content of your item, Garry has always been demonstrably impetuous and I’m a little surprised you give much credit to an entourage of Iagos and people trying to make a buck off of him. They may exist, to a degree, but he makes his own decisions, often with what I consider too little external input. That, and his mother is still very much the only real member the inner circle, or at least the “inner inner” circle.
In the brief time I have been close to him, most of his big decisions, dubious and otherwise, were made quickly and on his own. (Obviously the degree of his mother’s influence is unknown to me.) His sudden decision to dive into politics last year with the Committee 2008 Free Choice was against the advice of just about everyone. This was also true with his retirement. In both cases it was more after the fact concern than pre-announcement advice. Certainly in my case, as a selfish chess fan, I would much prefer he played chess until, at least, his best isn’t good enough. I’ve encouraged him to stay involved in the chess world by writing a column or training young players, and I expect he will eventually return to the board.
You can make a case that his combative, contrarian nature tends to lead him against the advice of friends and public opinion because he enjoys trying to prove people wrong. (I believe this largely explains his interest in the New Chronology.) If you are looking for a tidy reason why Garry has made bad decisions, I’d say it’s simply because he makes them very quickly. He doesn’t like dragging things out (what I would call contemplation) and he is very confident of the correctness of his decisions. This is essential in chess, but often a recipe for disaster in other areas, at least if you’re not as good at them as Kasparov is at chess.
This may be too prosaic, but it’s also Occam’s Razor. Since he has demonstrably improved in this area in the past five or six years (Predecessors Vol. 1 notwithstanding), I can’t imagine he was anything but worse ten or 15 years ago. It was all about action, making something happen, shocking the critics. He’s very sure of himself in just about everything and rarely seeks advice or tells people what he’s going to do.
Regarding his decline in public opinion, I think here too the answers are fairly simple. I concur with your specific examples, but the real basis is that people root for underdogs, not the favorite. When Kasparov was an outsider it was much different from when he became the status quo. Who doesn’t like a young rebel? Having power is very different from shouting at the gates. When you actually try to do something you are going to make enemies. And again he went about many of these things too much on his own, convinced he was 100% right and unwilling to compromise."
[0] Mig got me into seriously following and studying chess in about 2007-8, with his hilarious audio tournament broadcasts on ICC's ChessFM . There'd be him being extremely funny, teamed with a serious GM, usually strongly accented, like Yermolinsky or Har-Zvi. It was great. I'd listen to that while following tournaments live on FICS, and taking part in discussion about each game on there (no computer lines allowed), which were wonderful. That was a great community. The tv-style streamed youtube videos of today from Chess24 or St Louis, featuring strong GM commentators, live video of the players, player post-mortems, are amazing, but still maybe not as instructional and enjoyable as those days.
The ancient history: the ICS (Internet Chess Server) began in 1992, and started charging $ in 1995, becoming the ICC (Internet Chess Club). FICS (Free Internet Chess Server) split off then, led by people who wanted to keep it non-commercial.
[1] https://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/kasparov2.html