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Comment by elias94 | Hacker News Reader

True, but who uses chess.com anymore?

Ridiculous comment.

Chess.com is brilliant, and I use it as well as the less popular (but also brilliant) Lichess.

Lichess is "cooler" because it's non-profit but honestly, comments like that are reminiscent of the childish anti-Microsoft barbs from Linux ideologues that have thankfully declined in recent years.

They pay streamers to make it look big, and then their viewers have to use chess.com if they want to play them.

I have fallen in love with chess again over the past few months, and lichess is an absolutely amazing experience. Their mobile clients (iOS/Android) are both fantastic and BS free.

chess.com ranks #195 whereas lichess.org ranks #1546 on Alexa's top sites.

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/chess.com

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/lichess.org

If anyone is looking for a way to merge games from lichess.org and chess.com: I'm developing a website where you can link your accounts to view stats for all of your games. It's free and currently in Beta: https://www.chessmonitor.com/

Here is an example for the current world champion: https://www.chessmonitor.com/u/kcc58R9eeGY09ey5Rmoj

I've been wishing someone would make something like this! Always frustrated me that tools like aimchess and openingtree only allow you to look at the two sources separately.. supposedly, at least in aimchess's case, the reason being that the rating systems are different.

How do you unify ratings?

Edit: ah I see you don't, makes sense I guess. Might be interesting to have them both on the same graph even if the y axis is different..

As you say, I currently don't. In the future I might check the correlation between chess.com/lichess (when enough users register). Then I should be able to even calculate the chess.com rating from a lichess rating and vice versa.

But there are many other features I want to implement first. I'm currently more focused on the statistics part than on the chess.com/lichess relation.

Yeah definitely should be the focus! Would be excited to see some of the stats aimchess has implemented.. performance in various phases of the game.. tactics.. advantage capitalization etc.

I also found that when clicking through to an opening on your site, it would always say "no games find at this position". Bug?

Thanks for the feedback. It's not really a bug. More of a communication problem... ;)

The openings page list your openings for white and black. If you click on an opening it takes you to the explorer which shows the stats for only one color (white by default). Therefore, if you play an opening for black a lot it will appear in the list of your openings. But when you click on the opening, the explorer will show your stats for white.

There is also another problem, that the detection of openings (on the openings page) respects transpositions [1] while the explorer does not.

Maybe I'll remove the link to the explorer as this seems to cause a lot of confusion...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposition_(chess)

The majority of mainstream chess streamers, apart from the glorious Eric Rosen who's a huge lichess supporter.

Because they're paid by chess.com

They’re a great site for chess and chess variants. And their live commentary of chess events is actually exceptional.

I can't comment as to their commentary, but lichess has them soundly beat in pretty much every other way.

Incorrect. Chess.com has a superior lessons system (it isn’t just text and a predefined board) and it has a superior computer to play against. In Lichess you have to use one of 7 levels in chess.com you have a sliding scale from 250-3200 and they have a lot more tools to analyze the game both during (when playing bots) or after. I use both but I swear that the comments I see dissing chess.com seem to be from people who are hardly familiar with it.

Seriously, I am a paying customer of chess.com -- I for the life of me could not get a new user signed up to play chess with. We wanted to play and selected the wrong level by mistake ( beginner ) -- it won't allow you to play even if you are friends on the site. Horrible user experience. You want to play variants on your phone, can't. go to the website.. Lichess is just awesome! Play anyone you want, variants on the app. Love it.

I basically only play Lichess now (>3k games last few years), but used chess.com once in a while still to play with friends having an account there. Never had the problem you describe, sounds like PEBCAK. The constant chess.com hating here and on reddit is kinda off-putting, though.

It is. I also use both platforms and you can’t even bring up preferring chess.com here or on Reddit’s chess subs without being downvoted to oblivion and dogpilled. It’s super cult like similar to the way Musk fanboys come out in droves if you even suggest he isn’t some great man of history.

They're great, but far from the best

They don't support variants on the app which lichess does.

A ton of people.

Even if you don’t like or use it, chess.com is a very popular platform with a very large user base

what do you use?

I’m not the parent commenter, but I use Lichess. It’s free, supported by donations (so their incentives align with mine more than a business’), open source (which I like ideologically), and in my opinion just has a nicer user interface.

I started playing chess online less then a month ago. I started with chess.com, because I knew about it beforehand for some reason. After about a week there I couldn’t take their constant nagging about getting premium account: “Get a free 7 day trail”, “Get a premium account to unlock more analysis”, “you’ve reached your maximum puzzles for the day, get a premium subscription to unlock more”, etc.

I did some research (mostly on the online-go.com forums) and joined lichess.org and haven’t looked back since. Superior in every way.

Perhaps I should thank chess.com for being so annoying, if it weren’t for their constant nagging I would probably have stayed on the platform and never discovered lichess.org.

Lichess is much better in most ways.

Chess.com is much better in most ways.

Maybe lichess.org?

lichess.org, and I'm also a patron

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