Chess.com vs. Lichess | Hacker News Reader

Chess.com vs. Lichess

siddhesh.substack.com

365 pointsweekendvampire215 comments

I think lichess.org is far superior in that it has a super-polished UX in ways that are not immediately obvious. After I made the switch from chess.com in 2014 (I had the paid features), it was always extremely annoying to come back. Also lichess.org gives you most of what chess.com tries to upsell you on, for free. As it happens I've re-validated this over the last few days with dozens of games on chess.com.

A single example, and a counter-point to the article: Drawing knight-moves as "L"-shaped arrows is actually super annoying, because the likelihood that moves between different pairs of squares partially overlap is quite high.

And in general, the lichess.org app is miles ahead on visual clarity, giving feedback on your actions, and indicating your turn (seems trivial I know, but it's not). Chess.com on the other hand offers chess content, such as courses tournament coverage, blogs, etc. that lichess does not.

Yeah I was surprised at that. I think the arrows on chess.com are one of its biggest shortcomings. They are completely opaque and cover a lot of the board.

It's subjective. The arrows and circles on lichess really bug me. I much prefer chess arrows.

The tournament UI has been broken on iOS for years. It doesn't register taps properly and some UI elements are not shown where they should be. OTOH, the website works pretty well on mobile, scrolling aside.

In general, I also had the feeling that the lichess UI is a bit more immediate, it was easier for me to get around.

But I think a big difference is not in features or UX, but the behaviour of the players. Because of its free nature, lichess has several problems that I haven't seen on chess.com. I do use chess.com significantly less, but I've always had civil interactions there.

On lichess:

* people are free to act like jerks, since they will likely get away with it. My chat's turned off, but I can't do anything about people abandoning games when they lose, trying to pretend that they've left so that I don't pay attention and lose on time, etc.

* severe lack of gentlemanly behaviour. As an example, I don't think I've ever seen someone concede a game, it's almost always a bitter fight way past the point a reasonable player may accept defeat.

* Now that I think about it, lichess brings the worst in me. I want to crush my opponents and taunt them. Yet another reason why my chat's turned off.

Blitz is a vicious game, full of trickery. :)

I mean such behaviour is not uncommon on chess.com either. I've reported multiple people for game abandonment / abusive language / acting like jerks / taking super long to make moves in a game that's obviously been lost / etc.

My inbox is on chess is full of such generic boilerplate messages from chess.com; I doubt they really kick anyone off their platform though (unless the player does something extreme):

We've taken action on one of the Stalling / Quitting Games reports that you submitted. (To respect the privacy of our members, we don't specify usernames. Our response may have included warning the member, restricting their activity, or even closing the account.)

You can review our Community Policies here https://www.chess.com/legal/community.

Thank you for helping Chess.com stay fun and friendly!

Thank you very much, Chess.com Support support@chess.com

> taking super long to make moves in a game that's obviously been lost

I'm a novice still (~1500), but at this level you can easily come back from a lost game. Opponents sometimes think that I'm stalling, but in reality I'm trying to make the best out of a lost position. My opinion is that if you go into a game with a certain time limit, the players have full right to use that time how they please. If you are in a hurry, play a different time limit.

I don't play that much chess, but:

If a player has 60 minutes for all their moves, then spend less then a minute for each move, until they are so far behind that in your mind, the game is over, now, they are spending 20 minutes on one move. And I have to still sit in front of the computer, because if I leave, they might make a move just before their timer runs out, hoping that I have already left the room, and now I will lose because it's my timer that runs out.

Isn't the idea to set the maximum time permitted per-move to match whatever your personal patience level is?

Play a different time format then. I don’t understand players, several in this thread alone, who complain when their opponent uses some/all of the time that was allotted under the rules of the game that are agreed upon at the start. (I am similarly against the awarding of extra time.)

There's a wide gray area but surely there's some point where you think a person is just being rude.

Eg if someone mouse slips and blinders their queen on their 5th move in a 90 minute game. You have no concern with having to sit there for 1.5 hours where your opponent makes no further moves?

When I used to play, I also found that people otherwise at a similar level to me were really bad at endgames. Perhaps they resigned too often, and therefore got little endgame experience? Anyway, that meant that it was worth pushing to the end if I wanted to win, because sometimes it worked.

Presumably they can see how many times a player has been reported to abandon a game ahead of time. If it is the first report, I can understand they do nothing. If it is report number 10 ...

> severe lack of gentlemanly behaviour. As an example, I don't think I've ever seen someone concede a game, it's almost always a bitter fight way past the point a reasonable player may accept defeat.

I almost never concede at my (low) level: at my level it's very possible that someone lets me go into a stalemate which is preferable to a loss.

I’m also a low level player but I fundamentally don’t understand the chess culture of “gentlemanly” concession. It’s a game you’re playing to win and even at the highest levels players can and do make mistakes. It’s not over until it’s over. When you compete you play through the whistle. You run past the finish line. You keep throwing towards the endzone even when it’s 28-3 and things are looking pretty bleak.

Chess.com does benefit from their collection of training bots with different strategies and more forgiving play style which are pretty neat to play against. Though most of them are behind a paywall so eh.

Lichess only offers stockfish levels when it comes to bots, and even the lowest level seems more brutal than bots with x2 its ELO on chess.com.

Stockfish level 1 can be beaten by a novice playing their 4th or 5th game ever. Also on Lichess there are other bots you can play against, for example the maia series which is an LC0 bot with a neural network trained on Lichess games of a particular rating level. Maia feels much more like a real person than any bot based on stockfish.

https://lichess.org/blog/X9PUixUAANCqFRSh/introducing-maia-a...

Hmm I see, so there are other bots on lichess but they're set up as real players with a bot tag and you play them by challenging them directly. That seems like terrible UX when there's a whole separate menu to set up pve games and no way for a newcomer to learn that...

Sure stockfish level 1 is very beatable, but I do sometimes like sealclubbing super low rated bots so I don't have to think at all when playing and still win, for which the chess.com bots are very neat :P

Yes I agree it would be better and more discoverable if you had a list you could select from when you click the "Play With Computer" button. Maybe part of the reason that they don't is I don't think Lichess themselves actually host any of those bots, there are other people doing that who register it as a bot and it uses the Lichess API.

The UI is not only more polished, it is a web application packaged natively. Take that all you naysayers who insist you have to go native to write decent mobile apps.

It is not only a web application, it uses fucking mithril which hasn't seen an update in like 5 years. Take that you clueless hipsters who insist you have to use the latest reinvented framework with a yard length of dependencies to build modern UI.

If you've been following these two products for the last few years it's definitely clear to see that Lichess is slowly eating chess.com's lunch ... They're not fast at development, but slowly and surely improving and innovating on the space via being open source.

For example, Lichess puzzles aren't quite of the same quality yet and their puzzle games are new (BUT) they've built and are improving the tech to create new puzzles from games played on their system which is ever increasing, with the benefit of being REAL positions reached in games.

It feels like when Lichess make a move (eg into puzzle games) its sudden and of high quality. ++ Their growth is amazing especially considering they aren't paying chess influencers to use their platform.

Interesting perspective. I have subscriptions to both and my first reaction was the exact opposite of yours.

Chess.con is so far ahead of lichens that it wasn’t debatable.

What in your opinion leads you to believe that lichess is eating chess.com’s lunch.

For me games are far easier and quicker to setup with chess.com. The drills are better at chess.com and so are the lessons, both in-depth and breadth.

I can’t really think of a single thing lichess does better so I find it strange that you see things So vastly different.

Also the competition on chess.con seems far better. My Elo rank on lichess is a full 500 points higher on lichess than chess.com, so I guess some purple could consider the go cost to be a point for lichess

What do you see in lichess that i superior to chess.com?

How exactly increased elo makes lichess worse? I would only argue that because of the number of players chess.com it seems more stable. I really feel every 50 of elo difference.

It doesn’t. Especially in this case, because lichess doesn’t even use elo ratings. It’s a different rating system altogether.

https://lichess.org/faq#ratings

Chess.com also uses Glicko. Though it might be version 2 on lichess and version 1 on chess.com.

You're right about the versions, they also have wildly different starting values and very different player pools (I'd argue that more beginners play on chess.com), so you'd expect a substantial elo difference between websites

> I have subscriptions to both

I'm not sure how you have a subscription to Lichess when it's a free site. Do you donate?

> My Elo rank on lichess is a full 500 points higher on lichess than chess.com

The ratings difference on lichess is arbitrary. Everyone starts higher (1500 vs 1200), so the average is higher.

> For me games are far easier and quicker to setup with chess.com

Unless I've missed something on chess.com this makes no sense at all.

_To create a game on Chess.com:_

1. load site

2. hover over Play in the sidebar

3. click either New Game or Play (which one?)

4. Select time-control from a matrix (if you click on New Game it defaults to 10 minutes time control; if you click on Play it defaults to 1 minute).

5. click on Play to initiate search

_To create a game on Lichess:_

1. Load site

2. Select time-control from a matrix. search initiates immiediately

> I'm not sure how you have a subscription to Lichess when it's a free site

A subscription can just be an account - it doesn’t necessarily have to be a paid subscription.

That's weird, I've only ever used "subscription" as per this definition[0]:

"A subscription is an amount of money that you pay regularly in order to belong to an organization, to help a charity or campaign, or to receive copies of a magazine or newspaper."

[0] https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/subscri...

I get what you mean and I think the other guy was indeed misleading about this, but there really are lots of contexts where subscriptions are free. In the classic postal sense newsletters are mostly free (and yes, mostly spam), when a program "subscribes" for events from another program there isn't cost involved; and most importantly youtube channel subscriptions exist.

I also had the impression he implied paying for lichess, but technically the word subscription doesn't necessarily have that meaning in our current time any more.

Understood. I must be using it more pedantically than most. I think I use "sign-up/register/account" in those newer contexts.

Youtube has a subscribe button, and there is no money involved.

The most commonly used meaning of “subscription” is literally “the action of making or agreeing to make an advance payment in order to receive or participate in something.” And if the original commenter didn’t mean to be misleading and meant they had free accounts on both services, why mention having a “subscription” at all? It’s completely irrelevant.

No, then you would just say you have an account.

If you subscribe to a YT channel, you would just say you subscribe to the channel or you are a subscriber. You wouldn't say you have a "subscription" with the channel. That makes no sense.

This is way beyond the original point being made, but in the YT app, the button to view channels that a user has subscribed to is indeed labelled "subscriptions".

I agree that in this context, the natural interpretation of the word is that money has been invested.

> > I have subscriptions to both

> I'm not sure how you have a subscription to Lichess when it's a free site. Do you donate?

It's a sign they have actually not used Lichess, and just writing FUD.

The setup is not that relevant, what is relevant is how long it takes to get a match. And chess.com is much quicker at that.

I disagree, the time it takes to start searching for a match is part of how long it takes to get a match.

I’m assuming that you’re either very high or very low rated, because in the middle of the bell curve I find matches almost instantly on Lichess.

I do have a very low rating. When I create my account I started way up there, though.

I think when you click "Play", Chess.com starts a new game with the previous game parameters. So, if you always play the same game, it's faster.

They use different rating systems, different starting values for elo and in general, elo is a measure of your strength relative to the player pool you're playing in, so your elo across websites is not meant to be comparable.

E.g. in Lichess you'll always start at 1500, while in Chess.com you can start at 400 or 1200 (and some values in between I believe), so it's pretty normal if your ratings differ with hundreds of points - in fact it would be very weird if they didn't (unless you're 2400+ I suppose).

By the way, an interesting comparison some people try to make is elo in Lichess/Chess.com and FIDE rating and see if one can estimate FIDE rating for someone who has never played over-the-board just from their Lichess blitz rating.

Does chess.com have studies? They've completely changed how I work on openings. It's so easy to start a new study on some line, collect a few interesting games in it, add my own, and then analyze them with Stockfish right there for when I'm interested in it's opinion.

A great Lichess feature is that you can turn off ratings completely in settings, for the whole site. They're still used for matchmaking but kept completely hidden. Far better experience.

I think this is called “Zen mode” for those trying to find it.

I’ve had it active and it’s a good psychological edge. You should always just play the pieces coming at you and not think, "wow, this person’s 250 points better than me, I should expect to lose and play for a draw", but by hiding ratings you don’t introduce any chance to think like that.

Zen mode is only to hide things during the game.

What I mean is under "Preferences", "Site settings", "Show player ratings".

If it's "No", then no ratings are shown anywhere.

Ah, nice, thanks for the correction.

Site Settings only appears on the website, for Lichess app users like me who couldn't find it. But once you change the setting there it will apply in the mobile app if you're logged in.

I like this setting, but it makes the home page look barren to me. It totally removes the central block showing the leaderboard and tournament winners, becuase they contain ratings.

Lichess is libre, ad-free, gratis, open source, doesnt require a login, or anything. Chess.com cant even compete for me.

Your rating being higher on Lichess doesn't mean that the competition is better, Lichess ratings just start higher, see https://lichess.org/page/rating-systems

On the contrary, there are more Grandmasters playing on Lichess (like the World Champion), and if you check your percentile on both sites, you'll most likely see that you're better than a higher percentage of chesscom users than Lichess - which would indicate that Lichess players are better on average.

And yes, I also think Lichess is superior to chesscom i nearly every way.

I don't see anything that chess.com does better than Lichess except for having more players on the site. Aside from time to start game, which is usually a difference of only a couple seconds unless at high Elo, Lichess is equally good or better in all aspects. I'm not saying Lichess has better puzzles or other such things, but it is 100% equally good, while being free.

I spent a lot of time on chess.com (including paying for membership) but recently switched to lichess, because simply it feels a better, more polished, product. Love the fact it does not have ads (https://lichess.org/blog/YF-ZORQAACAA89PI/why-lichess-will-a.... ) unlike chess.com which is ad-infested.

Lichess is very customizable. Love the everyday tournaments and the community there as well. Would pay for it.

The in-game analysis in lichess is fantastic (too bad my favorite WebKit browser doesn't support WASM SIMD, looking at you Bug #222382 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=222382 ) so I don't get the full Stockfish NNUE. That is the only thing I miss really.

If you would pay for it, then do pay for it, by contributing a few dollars a month.

Ever heard about En Passant?

Holy hell

I've been teaching my daughter (7) to play chess, and I never knew this rule. She's going to be very excited to learn this one.

I have been teaching my daughter too. She is younger (she just turned 5), and En passant is one of the rules I voluntarily skipped (together with Castling). Pawns rules are already such a mess without it!

Lichess has a monthly subscription you can get for $5 or a custom amount. Does nothing except except make your badge a different color. Totally worth it to support such a great site.

Funny you mention annoying WebKit / Safari bugs. This bit me recently: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217897

It's worth noting many of these points are subjective, and I disagree with all of the bullets in favor of chess.com. I'm 2100 Elo on Lichess for what it's worth.

1. I prefer the way Lichess handles right clicks, knight movement tracking, and tracking arrows.

2. 4-player chess: The author mentions that it's their favorite variant to watch. I can't say I've heard that opinion before. Personally I tend to stick to vanilla chess, but it's worth noting that Lichess has many different variants available.

3. Games start faster: I've found games start faster on Lichess for me.

4. Varied playing sounds: Lichess also has different sounds for captures. Personally I turn the sounds off for slow chess since they're annoying, but I can't find my rhythm without them when playing bullet.

5. Multiple premoves: Actually it's much easier to win endgames on Lichess when you have 1 second left, since Lichess does not deduct time from your clock when you make premoves.

6. Social media: I've never seen any content from either on social media.

This comment is admittedly just a massive diss of chess.com, but it's not all bad. I think the main reason many people prefer chess.com is that it's familiar from the streams of the likes of Nakamura and Rozman. This is simply because chess.com pays streamers with the money they receive from premium users, whereas Lichess is free.

I prefer to play on my phone as opposed to with a mouse. I like short games 3 mins and under. I've tried so much to like chess.com, but it's just so much worse than Lichess. Chess.com feels choppy, I don't like the style of the pieces, and the app just kind of bugs me in comparison. I'm not a strong player, but I play a ton... maybe we are just creatures of habit and like the apps we are used to?

> This is simply because chess.com pays streamers with the money they receive from premium users, whereas Lichess is free.

Not only that but they also hold tournaments (ie: PogChamps which was a great success IMO) and they also have tournament analyses (ie: 2021 World Championship). They even have good production value! (outside of covid related limitations).

That being said, I agree with your diss of chess.com and will mention that I only play on lichess.

Good point. While I never use chess.com, I did find their commentary on the recent championship with Fabi to be pretty amazing.

On the other hand, all of the money they spend on content like that is super effective marketing. It's a lot like how Coke will sponsor sports matches. Still, feelings of good will are feelings of good will.

A feature I was surprised not to see in the "Cleaner page UI during chess games" section: Lichess has a zen mode that maximally simplifies the UI.

It removes the chat, navigation menu, move history notation. You're left with the board, clocks, resign/draw/takeback actions, and move replay.

You can activate it by pressing "Z" during a game, and there's a menu option too.

You can even hide player ratings site-wide, to fully focus only on chess.

Oh my god you can turn it on during a game?

Here I am turning it back on via the menu after saying GG each game! What a chum!

Same here! I can’t believe there’s a hot key for this! They really do think of everything.

Yes zen mode is amazing. You’d be surprised at how much better you do when you just focus on the game vs paying attention to your opponents rating.

Love turning on zen mode and just solving puzzles endlessly.

Anyone not playing Zen mode is doing themselves a huge disfavour. It allows you not to care about your opponents score, nor identity, nor messages.

One thing not mentioned here is the players. Chess.com is much more beginner heavy. I'm a pretty bad player, and while on lichess I'm slightly below the median, on chess.com I'm around 80th percentile. It also feels like the common or average playing style is a bit different, more basic and aggressive on chess.com. Here we go, another Fried Liver!

Would you mind sharing your rating on each?

I've found 600-level games on Chess.com much harder to win than 1000-level games on Lichess.

The Elo distribution is really different between them. I'm hovering around 1500 on lichess Blitz and 1100 on chess.com Blitz. I would say 1000 on lichess ~= 500-600 on chess.com.

I'm 1500 lichess and approx 1250 chess.com

50th percentile lichess and 80th percentile chess.com

Lichess starts you out at 1500 vs chess.com's 1200. So the whole bell curve is shifted.

IIRC in chess.com you can start as beginner/intermediate/advanced and your initial rating will be 800/1200/1600 respectively.

Chess.com and lichess use different rating systems, and give different ratings to new players. Chess.com ratings end up being consistently lower, but that doesn't correspond to you being in a lower percentile of players on chess.com (what parent was talking about).

For reference though, I'm 2000 lichess rapid, and 1700 chess.com rapid. I use chess.com as my "I'm not going to play well right now" site so it's a bit worse because of that, but mostly it's because of the difference in rating system/pool.

who cares about absolute rating? no matter what the rating of your opponent is, it's all about the _difference_ between theirs and yours. It would have been nice to just have 1 number and one unit but it isn't. Now you have x on Fide, y on lichess, z on USCF, t on chess.com and w on fics. (for me it's 2000 Fide, 2300 Lichess, no USCF, no chess.com and 1850 on fics )

Well, actually I've even found 600-level games on Chess.com to be harder than 900-level games.

Obviously I've improved. But I wonder if the many of the very low ratings on Chess.com are just due to people making terrible blunders in otherwise pretty solid games.

I've also noticed that there isn't a lot of difference. You get horrible blunders from higher rated players and lower rated players will kick your ass. I can drop or rise 200 Elo points in a couple of hours easily.

I’ve written extensively on the rampant cheating happening on chess.com:

https://travelhead.medium.com/rampant-cheating-on-chess-com-...

LiChess on the other hand has incredible cheat detection algorithms, and I’ve only reported one cheater in the dozens of games I’ve played since quitting Chess.com and moving to Lichess.

(I’m approximately 2350 on LiChess).

This is sad to see. I’ve played about 300 Rapid games on chess.com and there’s only one banned player in my game history. Am I just lucky?

I’m not good enough to instinctively suspect cheaters, and running post-game analysis on all of your games seems like a big time sink for little gained.

Another possible (dark pattern) solution would be an option to only play against other paying customers. I’d assume players who have paid would be less likely to risk losing their account. This would probably be a revenue boost for chess.com but might also upset free account holders.

Also, if chess.com shadow-banned accounts by only matching them against bots instead of real players maybe they’d be less likely to immediately create a new account.

I limited my article to only opponents that chess.com analyzed and banned after my report. There’s dozen more I reported that they failed to ban, and my guess is it has to do with a financial incentive to show more ads.

There’s definitely a large swath of cheaters in the 1900-2200 range on chess.com.

If you have some server sitting idle you could consider contributing cycles to the fishnet: https://lichess.org/get-fishnet

I requested this a few months ago as my server was sitting unused and I wanted to help. Never got an answer back, maybe because the server's specs aren't great. Either way now I've got nextcloud running so unfortunately too late :(

You probably had the "laptop mode" toggled on in the setup. With it on you will rarely get games to analyse. This will only send you games when the network is stressed. If you toggle it off you should get one game after another almost constantly.

I doubt it's speed. I was getting constant games with an i3-5100.

I never even received a response when I filled out the Google Forms, so I don't have an API key to use.

Neat. Is this vulnerable to abuse by submitting bad results back to the server, or have they figured out a low-cost way of verifying the integrity of the results somehow?

TBH I don't know if they feature any kind of protection against that. You can check/ask here https://github.com/niklasf/fishnet/issues

For chess analysis, I recommend SCID vs PC.

It turns out that chess-playing programs have standardized upon UCI (Universal Chess Interface), meaning any chess-playing program, (IE: Stockfish and Leela Chess) can interface with any UCI program (in this case, SCID vs PC).

SCID vs PC can then be tuned to whatever you think is appropriate for review. Add the tablebases if you want perfect endgame analysis, or favor faster reviews with less analysis (if you're going for speed). Or you can run analysis overnight, if you want the computer to spend 20+ minutes per position.

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With an actual analysis program like SCID vs PC, you can try variations and deeper studies than what either chess.com or lichess.org can offer. There's no replacement to just running these calculations on your own very capable computers... rather than leveraging the limited compute abilities of a shared server with a thousand players on it. (Or in the case of lichess, I think its a Javascript program instead of a proper x86-assembly tuned high-speed analysis bot).

Stockfish in particular has a nifty quirk: most of its analysis is done in a giant hash table of positions. Meaning variations / transpositions are very quick for Stockfish to analyze (or more like, Stockfish probably has a variation already partially-analyzed before you even decided to think about it yourself. The hash table stores this partial analysis, and allows Stockfish to have a leg-up on analyzing the position when you decide upon exploring that variation).

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The equivalent for Go is Lizzie, which is easier since Lizzie comes with LeelaZero and KataGo already. (KataGo is the superior analysis engine IMO. Both are superhuman, but KataGo's score-based analysis is more useful for finding endgame mistakes).

Lichess uses Stockfish 14+ NNUE compiled with WASM, so it should be essentially as fast as running it locally on your own machine. They don't expose as many of the tuning options, but that's not an enormous difference for most people.

So no, it is just just some Javascript program.

And as far as I know, essentially every modern chess engine uses a hashtable of positions such that transpositions are essentially free. This isn't a unique "quirk" of Stockfish.

Except Stockfish has some hand-written x86-specific bits, such as PEXT / PDEP, or BMI2 instructions. I'm talking hand-tuned assembly here, really good stuff and very high performance.

Running Stockfish 30% to 40% slower for no reason at all, and with far less RAM / resources means that you'll get weaker analysis at slower speeds.

And those "tuning options" include tablebases, which would provably play perfectly (and Stockfish is smart enough to "think" with tablebases: if it can prove a won position with a tablebase, it won't bother exploring and will just report the mate-in-300 immediately)

PEXT is mostly for magic bitboards, right? So it’s more of a one time cost. But still, I’d be amazed if it weren’t much slower in the browser now and forever.

No. Magic Bitboards are what you use if you don't have PEXT available. EDIT: I expect the WASM version to use magic-bitboards (which is just a "magical" multiply instruction + a lookup).

Every single sliding piece (ie: Rooks, Bishops, and Queens) use PEXT (or magic-bitboards if the PEXT code is unavailable) to determine where to go. Its a fundamental calculation to determine very, very quickly which moves are legal or not.

Both PEXT and Magic Bitboards are incredible techniques for solving the sliding-piece question. However, PEXT is much much much faster, but relies upon an obscure x86-only assembly instruction (that is slower on AMD Zen or Zen2 unfortunately. So you still need to know your hardware details, Intel machines should use the PEXT version).

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Still, even AMD users want the BMI2 version, which has a bunch of bit-operations that can be optimized that are used all the time. (And besides, AMD Zen3 is actually faster on PEXT now, so PEXT is looking good for the future)

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In either case, I have my doubts that the NNUE neural-net runs anywhere near as good on WASM than on the hand-optimized SIMD / AVX kernels that the Stockfish team wrote.

Even if there's some auto-vectorization that WASM can do, its really hard to beat handcrafted assembly / intrinsics (https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/master/...)

Yeah, that’s all I meant, PEXT does the same job as magic bitboards where it’s available. But my point was that either way it’s run once (I seem to remember it’s even a constexpr in recent Stockfishes) so I’d be surprised if it were a major performance hit.

> But my point was that either way it’s run once

Both Magic Bitboards and PEXT are run every single time Stockfish thinks of a Queen, Bishop, or Rook. Literally every, single, time.

Stockfish does something like 10-million positions per second or something. That's a lot of times the "where can the Queen move" analysis is run. Speeding that routine up by 50% or something (PEXT vs Magic Bitboards) really does make a difference in the great scheme of speed.

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Unless you're playing some fantasy-version of Chess (or maybe some extreme endgame where all pawns, queens, bishops, and rooks are dead... pawns because they might promote into a queen/bishop/rook), you'll be benefiting from selecting that PEXT version if you're on an Intel or Zen3 processor.

Gotcha sorry, been a long time since I did this in chess and the last engine I wrote was for Hnefatafl where you’re using slightly bigger boards and I don’t remember there being a PEXT equivalent for bigger SSE stuff. Somehow convinced myself the lookup table generation was the only hard bit.

Yeah, PEXT only works on 64-bit numbers (and therefore, the 8x8 chess board / 64-bit "bitboard", with 1-bit per position).

EDIT: Both PEXT and Magic Bitboards have a "Setup" phase that is run once. But there's also a separate phase that is run on every single position in the actual chess-board part.

Thanks for the refresher. You can tell I've abandoned these things half way through too many times! :)

Variable-shift perfect hashing (fancy magic) is not especially slower than using pext/pdep, and in any case, there is little value in making move generation more performant. A decent move generator using perfect hashing can run at 40 mnode/s, but Stockfish runs at about 1 mnode/s with a single thread (because of the other work it does). A quick application of Amdahl's law shows that the performance gain from speeding up move generation by any amount is negligible. In fact, with a transposition table and staged move generation, for many nodes only a fraction of possible moves are generated.

Is the performance difference of PEXT vs. the classic 64-bit magic bitboards actually close to 50%? The very slight latency increase of and/multiply/shift instead of pext should be somewhat offset by somewhat smaller tables (since magic hashing can have helpful collisions), right?

I should probably know this, since I "discovered" PEXT bitboards, but I got out of computer chess before I got BMI-capable hardware, and so I never actually implemented them :)

> Running Stockfish 30% to 40% slower for no reason at all, and with far less RAM / resources means that you'll get weaker analysis at slower speeds.

Even if 100% true, this is a complete non-issue. Absolutely nobody reading this comment is going to notice a meaningful difference or benefit from running their games against a 3550 Elo engine running hand-optimized x86 instructions versus a 3200 Elo engine running in WASM in the browser.

The extreme convenience of pressing one button to receive high-quality analysis (and ongoing live analysis powered by a WASM engine) beats the annoyance of exporting your games to PGN and importing them into an external UI just for the sake of analyzing your games even farther past the horizon that humans will ever truly be able to understand. If you're a competitive GM or Super GM? Sure, maybe that level of analysis will help you find unexplored lines for your preparation. Fro anyone else? It's completely irrelevant.

> The extreme convenience of pressing one button to receive high-quality analysis (and ongoing live analysis powered by a WASM engine) beats the annoyance of exporting your games to PGN and importing them into an external UI just for the sake of analyzing your games even farther past the horizon that humans will ever truly be able to understand. If you're a competitive GM or Super GM? Sure, maybe that level of analysis will help you find unexplored lines for your preparation. Fro anyone else? It's completely irrelevant.

Its one button click for me.

"Download .PGN" button -> open with SCID vs PC (which I setup as the default app for PGNs).

I hit "F2" and bam, analysis is going on already. Sure, you have to set it up so that the F2 engine is Stockfish / tuned parameters as appropriate, but in the long run, having control of this is clearly beneficial. Especially if you're going to be using computer analysis to teach yourself more advanced tactics.

> Or in the case of lichess, I think its a Javascript program instead of a proper x86-assembly tuned high-speed analysis bot

Stockfish compiled to multithreaded WASM (on supporting browsers)

What do you use for a database? I seem to remember the person behind Caissabase inhabits these parts but that hasn’t been updated in a while. I have ChessBase but find myself in Linux most of the time and haven’t copied the database over because ChessBase’s UI causes me great pain.

He does (it's me).

It was last updated on 5th December 2021, next release will be 1st Jan 2022 (since World Rapid/Blitz championship is on-going and I want to roll that into it).

Lichess has a 'fishnet' of donated servers [0] that allow you to analyse using Stockfish on proper hardware. You can have up to 20 deep analyses a day.

The web client uses Stockfish compiled to WASM which is decently fast.

If you're not an IM/GM, it's "good enough"

[0] https://github.com/niklasf/fishnet

There’s also chessx[1], which is what I’ve found myself to prefer (I’ve also never gotten SCID vs PC to run on macOS, unfortunately). It has some oddities, but once you get past that there’s a lot of great functionality to enjoy.

[1]: https://chessx.sourceforge.io

This comes up so often it’s a bit lady doth protest too much. they have strengths and weaknesses.

As a 1200 elo. I prefer the analysis and game review on chess.com. I like the auto playback of alternative lines. Game review is more useful because I actually use it every time. Lichess game review might be more powerful, I don’t know but I find I use it less. Other little things chess has. The charts showing deviation from best move over the game. I like the video lessons. I prefer the square highlighting. I prefer the knight arrows on chess.com too.

I think it deserves a separate mention: lichess has so much better clock UI. Their clock is big and very clearly visible both on desktop and mobile. It also goes red when you are low on time. Chess.com's clock is tiny and I saw some GM complaining on his stream about losing on time because he was unable to track his clock because of that.

I've played on both (currently on Lichess). Few other distinguishing features:

* Chess.com has many excellent user blogs if you're into analysis and chess history.

* As a commercial platform, Chess.com can do a lot more to support professional players (Pro Chess League, etc.).

* The Lichess studies feature is really good and I don't think there's a comparable feature on Chess.com?

Regarding studies, it is kind of similar to https://www.chess.com/library?tab=community-collections

I would love to see XiangQi on Lichess or a suggestion for a good one. I suck at Chinese chess, but after learning it I was demolishing my friends from the headspace it gave me, the complexity really seemed to help me be a better chess player. I feel like I was an amateur "take as many pieces as you can and overwhelm the king" before and Chinese Chess turned me into a "sacrifice your pieces to position yourself better, value the pieces differently at different points of the game, and kill the king ASAP with pressure" player.

In Chinese Chess, I try playing against others and I know I probably lost in the first 5 moves often, I really suck at it, and in 10 moves I usually can tell I lost, I have never won once against a player online.

The entire site is open source. You could make your own.

People have done that for Go.

https://github.com/ornicar/lila

I don't have the source, but I remember read the lichess didn't want to implement other board games in their interface.

For XiangQi, I know that you can play it on playok.com (I know the rules and played a few games last time just to get the feeling, but I am more into chess and shogi...).

Yeah I get murdered there. I should learn to get better I am always beaten by computers too.

I just went on playok to play couple of games of xiang qi and... I also got murdered...

Those guys are too good. Did you ever win? Know what I mean by you lost in the first few moves?

I played three games and lost them all. It's as you said, I felt that in the opening they knew something I didn't and they entered quickly in my camp. The strange thing is that when I played last year, I didn't have that feeling at all, the games felt pretty even - I won one game because my opponent resigned after I declined his draw offer.

If you want we can play some games some day. My email is in my profile if you're interested.

You're in luck! https://www.pychess.org/ is exactly what you want; it took the Lichess source code but adapted it to a bunch of chess variants, including Xiang'qi.

Thank you I’ll try it!

Lichess is a bit sluggish in navigation, but it's almost purely community driven and you can feel that! I do support them and I really like their transparent philosophy, they even show you WHERE do they spend EVERY received $! Yes, there are some flaws, but me with other guys are actually making the website just better every day. Chess.com sure has their own philosophy, better moderation, better news articles (sometimes written by professional journalists), but hey, it's almost like a comparison of good paid service with good opensource community driven thing. Like... Windows vs Linux. Both do have their downsides, but the core philosophies are different and you just follow them or not.

If you get a paid subscription to chess.com it evens out. No ads, etc. You have a lot of control over your view of the chess game - it doesn't need to be cluttered. I appreciate that lichess is free and opensource, but I think chess.com has done a lot for the chess world with all the money they made during the lockdown. Especially during the pandemic, when there were no OTB tournaments chess.com put money into a lot of tournaments.

Lichess is the best thing that happened to chess since castling. Chess.com just grabbed a good domain name.

You can invite a friend to play on lichess, because it's free. This is a good direction for the tech world to go. I'm very glad there are people like ornicar, creating the world they want to see and live in.

It seems pointless to discuss chess.com without mentioning the paid features like game analysis which are much more user-friendly than Lichess.

Agreed. The post-game analysis on chess.com will make you a better player faster. It automatically turns your key game moments into chess puzzles.

Lichess does this as well, and it's completely free. It's the "Learn From Your Mistakes" button visible after you've performed computer analysis of your game.

For one thing, framing your accuracy in percentage instead of the obscure "centipawn loss" makes understanding how well you played much easier. BTW I've compared their analysis on a number of games, and it seemed like lichess is much tougher on you in what it defines as a blunder.

I disagree, ACPL is a well defined system, while nobody really knows what the accuracy means or how it's defined.

1 CPL, in short, is the loss of 1/100th of a pawn. Take the average of that and you get ACPL. So a ACPL of 100 means that you on average lost one pawn on every move (of course this isn't literal) that you played.

I've read the meaning and I can tell what the numbers mean, but it's still less intuitive than percentage.

Interesting, I find the exact opposite. Measuring things in terms of pawns give me a feel of how far behind I was from optimal play, whereas with the percentage, it's quite abstract. What does 70% accuracy mean?

That you're 30% far from optimal play :)

Yeah but what does “far” mean. You have experience with loss of pawns but not distance to optimal play

100% is only best moves (my record is 99.8%), anything above 90 is awesome, etc. I'm not sure what 15 ACPL means, but if you tell me 95% perfect it's more intuitive to me personally. But it might be because I'm not a very good and sophisticated player...

I think the percentage give you a sense of familiarity. You're used to be graded 0-100 in exams and such. However, that grade is actually not that useful or intuitive as you may think, since you don't know how your game is scored. You don't understand the metric. For instance, it could mean the number of moves you got perfectly divided by the total number of moves in the game. It could be the number of moves you lost at most 30 centipawns by the number of moves. It can mean anything, the point is just that it's a black box and no one truly understands that metric outside of chess.com. Whereas average centipawn loss is a tried metric which everyone uses, except for chess.com.

I find game analysis in lichess much better than chess.com's. The advices it gives out are usually rubbish.

This is one area where I think the cosmetics for purchase model makes sense. It could be seen as a way to support a creator in a built in way as part of an app. For many free projects it can be easy to overlook the fact that someone has poured their time and effort into it to make it happen, especially if they don't have "ads" that are asking directly for donations.

I also recently switched to Lichess after using Chess.com for years. What tipped it for me was that I switched to an iPhone, and for some reason the Chess.com app on the iPhone absolutely obliterated my battery. I'm not sure what the issue was and maybe it's been fixed, but for a while it was just eating up battery life while playing like nothing else.

The servers for Lichess I find a little less reliable, but it's mostly fine. I also like the free-ness and ad-free business model of Lichess. I ended up donating $10. Overall Lichess is a better experience. Chess.com is perfectly usable without paying, but the constant nagging to sign up for a subscription is annoying.

The lichess app is all around better. Bullet is unplayable on chess.com's app.

Really? I play billet games on my phone almost daily.

Maybe try to reinstall your app if or crashes or won’t let you play because I’d definitely should.

It doesn't crash; it's sluggish. It's hard to quantify but it's like there is a quasi animation effect that you can't turn off. In something like 3|2 it's not terrible but in 1 minute games its a real issue.

I thought for a while that maybe I was just used to the lichess interface but I don't have the same sluggish feel when playing on my phone on the website vs the app.

There’s def a lag on chess.com ios app compared to that of lichess. It is super apparent in the endgames

Interesting. I've never seen that, perhaps I'm just lucky, or not as good as you that i notice the lag:)

Or you are good enough you don't have to try flagging every game for a chance to win!

Fun fact: the lichess app is built with Capacitor and is open source https://github.com/veloce/lichobile

I prefer Lichess simply because it handles connections far better than Chess.com which has a long-standing history of dropping them mid-game and denying its a problem at their end.

Other than that, I find Chess.com's interface more polished, but Lichess ultimately more personal, I guess as it is less corporate.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned is the ability to play without logging in on lichess.

Very convenient when you want to play with a friend.

Also useful when you want to try strange or unusual openings without ruining your rating

A smidge off topic, but I'm curious; is there a place where you can upload (say) a chess bot you designed and play against other uploaded chess bots? (or any move base game, even as simple as 'paper rock scissors')?

Yeah, I also thought this was going to be bot vs bot :)

Lichess allows you to upload a custom bots and play them (and other can too), and I believe you can also run against other bots. There's also https://www.chess.com/computer-chess-championship, but IDK how one enters.

You can do so on lichess. Basically you create a chess engine, set it as a bot account, and let it go against other engines and real players.

I don't do it myself, but more info here: https://lichess.org/blog/WvDNticAAMu_mHKP/welcome-lichess-bo... And here: https://lichess.org/api#operation/botAccountUpgrade

Oh! Excellent... Thanks!

You can also use the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS) as a test bed for chess engines. The interface is telnet-based, so it's pretty easy to experiment with and learn. There's also "zippy" mode in xboard that allows you to connect your engine to FICS .

The commands below will login as a guest and display all of the computer accounts. Use the finger command to find info about an account.

  telnet freechess.org
  g <ENTER>
  who C<ENTER>
  finger ACCOUNT

Sadly, FICS has been dying a slow death for the past 10 years ... but there are plenty of idle CPU accounts waiting for an opponent.

Haha I remember a friend had made a lisp one with as few lines as he could use, on his macbook which he used the gyro to install smackbook to change the virtual desktop. https://www.engadget.com/2006-05-25-smackbook-and-macsaber-b... good times.

Multiple premoves is not really a pro for chess.com. Premoves function differently on the two websites. On chess.com, each premove takes 0.1 seconds from your clock when it executes, while on Lichess, they do not take any time at all. Given that difference, having multiple premoves would be too strong. Given the way premoves behave differently, I wouldn't say either one is superior to the other.

Conditional pre-moves on chess.com are very useful for people playing correspondence chess, so that games can finish up a bit more quickly

That's a different feature, but sounds cool! Didn't know about that.

You can premove as many moves as you want in a lichess correspondence game. I feel like you can even premove to whatever depth you want, but it has been a while since I've played.

Lichess also has conditional pre-moves in correspondence chess

thanks, didn't realize that was in there (I only use lichess on my phone though...)

For a long time, conditional premoves in correspondence didn't exist on the mobile app, only on the site - but that's fixed now too.

I started playing on chess.com in 2015 and my main issue was: they UI felt clunky and it seems to be deducting to much time from my clock even with premoves!!!

Switched to lichess in 2017 or so and it's just way superior when it comes to UI/UX and performance specifically!

I ran site performance tests for both a while ago and they numbers confirmed my subjective experience.

I'm not really concerned about the design, UI/UX or the algorithms as I just play pretty much at random to beat boredom, anxiety, and time-fillers. I don't make "friends" nor do I train, puzzles, or anything but just want to play with another human on the other end. I approach game plays on the experience and mistakes, and tries a more heuristic approach. I know I should try to learn the tactics.

As of today (on chess.com since Jul 8, 2007), I have played 15,472 and done 1 puzzle and 1 lesson. 1415 rating in Blitz, and I play either 3min or 5min max.

I have played 79 games on Lichess since joining in May 10, 2015. 1716 in Blitz.

I always land up on chess.com because there are enough people that I open a challenge, I get a player on the other end within seconds. Not so on Lichess - I have waited for 30+ minutes on most occasions.

In 2021 you can always get a blitz game in 1 or 2 seconds on lichess by choosing one of the standard time controls (in the "quick game" tab, which is the front page).

It's amazing to me that an open source product can be better than a paid product.

I think OGS is quite good vs fox except that fox has alot more players in the go world

Linux servers are everywhere, MS uses linux, linux users are common on here, wikipedia killed Encarta. Don't be amazed, its the norm.

On chess: XBoard+gnuchess/stockfish, SCIM... free software won in a lot of places.

> Lichess is developed and managed mostly by one guy

wow! is this realy true?!

going based off the github insights, yep seems mostly true, and it's the case for a surprising number of large projects.

https://github.com/ornicar/lila/graphs/contributors

It is true! He also occasionally streams development of lichess live on twitch.

https://www.twitch.tv/ornicar2

Yes, he seems to be very happy to be building a cool project with a good community around it - https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/mpasyl/i_started_lic...

Related, but slightly offtopic:

Does anybody know sort of an open source/DIY alternative to digital chessboards like DGT boards? Would love to use something like that for input, but real DGT boards are very expensive, unfortunately.

At one point I was planning to make something using a glass table with a camera underneath it and ArUco markers on the bottom of the chess pieces.

The problem with trying to make something that uses electronics is the number of squares on the board making it quite a big fiddly task.

Decent analysis and I agree with all the points. I think if chess.com didn't have the streamer network behind it and Gotham/Hikaru etc moved to lichess that people would entirely forget about chess.com.

I was just about to open lichess for some blitz games but thought I'd read hacker news first.

I used to play chess.com but it just feels spammy in comparison.

Go look at lichess's open source codebase and tell me that isn't a beautiful product

It has been a few years since I looked at any of the major chess sites, but it used to be that chess.com had way more teaching and training material than lichess.

Where do they stand nowadays in that regard?

I also see that ChessCube.com is gone. Too bad. They had an interesting tournament format whose name I forget that was wild and fun. Instead of having a fixed number of games like normal tournaments, these ran for a fixed time. As soon as you finished a game you could go back into the pool to be paired for another game. So someone who is fast and good had a better chance of winning the tournament than someone who is good but not as fast, because they could play more games.

Lichess has some good lessons especially for beginners but they don't have audio like chess.com's. I think they are good though and what is neat about them is they are based on the studies feature, so anyone can create an interactive lesson on Lichess and share them. When my kids got interested in chess I created Lichess accounts for them.

Some of chess.com's content helped me when I first started playing again, but I later found other free stuff that's just as good. It is nice to have it all in one place but I cancelled my membership when I found out I only got 25 puzzles a day with my "gold" membership. That is just lame.

Lichess calls that an "arena" tournament, they run constantly.

The chess.com UI was just so unpleasant I never even used it enough to get a feel for the site overall. I like that they fund a lot of the GM streamers on youtube but even in those videos it's unpleasant just to look at.

The author is mentioning "multiple premoves" as a reason Chesscom is better, which makes the mistanken assumption that more is somehow better. In my (and most strong Bullet players I've talked to) opinion, it changes the Bullet meta for the worse, because it adds more noise. I'm rated 2600 in Bullet on both sites, for what it's worth.

"One premove" could just as well be a reason why a site is better than the other than "Multiple premoves". I also think that the chessboard and playing UI is much smoother on Lichess, as opposed to the author - it's a matter of opinion.

For most of course it's not important, but Lichess has "blind mode" - this enables blind people to play chess online. Implementing this feature of course wouldn't pay off for Chess.com.

Regarding interactive training resources, there are other good resources which are partially free (or limited) and partially payable content:

- https://chesstempo.com/ has a great collection of chess puzzles

- https://www.chessable.com is specialized on interactive training. They have may free courses and combine what a classical book (text plus moves) would have done with memorization tools (for openings, tactics etc)

A lot of people have an emotional and philosophical attachment to lichess, which is understandable. It's surprisingly (almost inexplicably...) free, clean, pleasant, awesome, and featureful. However, chess.com does have its advantages as well as unique features. And it is much quicker to find a match. I like both, but chess.com design is too busy for my taste. I'd use lichess a lot more if it didn't take so long to find a match, specially in certain times of the day.

I wonder how much general agreement there is with these opinions. Personally I agreed with most of the UI opinions except the preference for L-shaped knight move arrows.

My only online gaming is playing endgames: https://lichess.org/training

Glad to see Lichess mentioned here. I have been trying without success to log in or password reset using a Gmail account. Messages from Lichess never seem to be delivered to Gmail, even to the Spam folder. Short of creating a throwaway account to access the forums, is there any alternate way to contact Lichess admins to ask if this is a known issue?

You can go on the lichess discord, a lot of mods and admins are online there.

started off with chess.com and moved over to lichess years ago. Haven’t looked back since. Yeah sometimes it takes a while to join a game if you are trying to just play casual, but all in all I like it better. Can’t believe it’s mostly ran by one guy. Thought they had a team of devs, makes me appreciate the product even more now.

I haven't seen much mention of the fact that Chess.com looks good, and Lichess looks bad. The graphics are prettier on Chess.com, and the sounds are better. Fortunately, this should be a very easy problem for Lichess to fix. Lichess just needs a bit more game juice, and it will feel as good as Chess.com.

Also recently switched to Lichess from Chess.com. The biggest benefit so far is the community. I don't know if Lichess just has better mods or if the two sites just attract vastly different crowds.

Some players on Chess.com were downright rude (win or lose) and even had a racial slur tossed at me.

So far so good on Lichess.

Here’s an advantage of chess.com that I haven’t heard discussed yet. When playing against the computer I can request hints when I’m stumped. If lichess supports this then I haven’t found it yet. As a mediocre player I find it very instructive.

chess.com has always been more laggy when moving pieces around than lichess, which is perfectly lag free animation for me. Not sure what is causing it, but I have the feeling, that it affects my blitz performance a lot, especially in time trouble.

I use lichess. The one downside is apparently the ratings on lichess are somewhat inflated

I think it's due to new accounts starting with a higher Elo, and the fact I think LiChess' isn't even really Elo but their own measurement

Lichess uses Glicko-2 rating method, see https://lichess.org/faq#ratings

I personally find the Lichess board cleaner and more beautiful. Using circles to highlight squares is clearer, and drawing knight moves as straight lines is clearer, as well. I also just prefer the pieces and the board colour.

Lichess is far superior to other chess sites in the interface, quality of play, and quality of the community.

Chess.com does have some excellent pay-extra-to-use content.

I always think that Lichess is really the apex website in terms of chess in the internet.

Nit: Lichess does play different sounds between captures and moves.

Newbies should check out r/anarchychess for tips

Be brave, be honest to yourself and stop this trush talkings!!!

which of these sites do people find is better for analyzing games? I have trouble remembering what I learn from looking at one game at a time

Lichess analysis is free and uses a much newer version of Stockfish, though some people prefer Chess.com's UI.

I'm a Lichess fan. Love Puzzle Storm!

Its good to have options

lichess : chess :: online-go : go

Lichess is so much better. It's free. chess.com thinks its facebook and it looks really childish (they probably copied things from chesskid). They have like a billion developers (why? its chess.. and already done). Lichess is like 1 guy (who I think used to work for chesscom until the ceo was a dick or something)

haha no he never worked for chess.com, wonder where you heard that one :D

lichess is not one guy either, there's a whole community of developers, moderators etc.

i have sources. lots of old employee posts who quit also talking shit about the ceo

Lichess is much, much better. It's free. Chess.com is a bloated mess and it won't change.. they think they are facebook.

Sounds like we need a chess DAO. It would be cool to have a piece of the game of "Chess".

Sounds like a hammer seeing nails.

https://discord.gg/VJuEZZuD it exists

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