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Comment by tholman | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

> 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 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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