Lichess: The free and open source chess server | Hacker News Reader

Lichess: The free and open source chess server

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466 pointsperihelions83 comments

Lichess is amazing given how little they receive in funding. The interface is miles ahead of commercial competitors.

They also handle guest plays much better. I've faced less cheating bots and no annoying pop ups on lichess when playing as a guest compared to chess.com

Can anyone point me to how they handle cheating detection? I would love a high level overview of how it works especially when you have no data on the player.

fun nugget: HN users hosted tournaments on lichess at the start of the pandemic [0]

0] https://lichess.org/team/hacker-news

> The interface is miles ahead of commercial competitors.

I much prefer the chess.com UI

Same. I love lichess and I’m so happy it exists, but I prefer the chess.com interface for playing, and analyzing games.

Probably because I started there

I play on both sites, but for analysis I almost always import the games into chess.com

Can you share what it is that you need to see on chess.com but is not available on lichess?

(I use lichess analysis frequently and haven't used chess.com much)

I personally think lichess analysis is better :

- latest engine, with webassembly or cloud mode - "learn from your mistakes" mode where when there is a drop in valuation of the position, you're given the position and are asked to find a better move ; you can also find bad moves from the opponent which is interesting to help spot mistakes faster

Also puzzles are great if you have an account (free), I find the puzzles of great quality, they really match your level and once you get better at solving the common tactics, they look more and more like small studies where you might only get positionnal advantage sometimes (instead of the classic "win material / mate in X moves" type of problem which is a bit redundant after a while).

I don't know how they generate puzzles but it seems that a lot of them are from games actually played on the site where only one line seems to give an advantage. I think it's amazing that they do that. High quality puzzles from real games.

Not sure about lichess specifically, but I know many game servers are a bit cagey about their cheat detection systems, since they don't want to give the cheaters any hints.

But as a broad concept, one technique is to compare moves against bot suggested moves. i.e. if a high % of your moves are those that a strong AI would make, something is fishy.

There’s a much simpler and more effective way. I met someone who had done that work for a chess company, done some ML to detect cheats, and they were surprised how easy it was to detect changes.I’m not going to post the solution but you might be able to guess if you think through the feature space. It’s obvious in retrospect.

> Can anyone point me to how they handle cheating detection?

You can listen to Thibault talk about here [0]

0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZgyVadkgmI

It is open source also the neural network that they use for that. It is called Irwin and you can find it on GitHub.

I imagine (without research) that it's just "what percentage of your moves are the same as top computer moves", with a threshold.

They seem to use two projects:

Irwin: https://github.com/clarkerubber/irwin

Kaladin: https://github.com/lichess-org/kaladin

Always excited when chess pops up on HN once a month or so. As someone who picked it up as a hobby in December, I can attest that lichess is a great app and site for folks looking to get back into the game or get started (I’m also a premium chess.com member as I use both products).

For those of you thinking about picking up chess, I’d highly recommend watching the Chess Brah “Building Habits” series on YouTube. Watch the first five or so videos, and just start practicing those habits in rapid games (recommend 15 minute with 10 second increment on lichess, which shows up as 15+10). Embrace the losses, and just keep working on not hanging your pieces for free.

If you’re intimidated by playing other humans, you can try the “Maia 1” bot on Lichess. It’ll likely beat you up for a while if you’re a beginner, but it’s a bot designed to play more like a human, and it’ll help you get the reps to feel more comfortable playing other humans.

From there, just enjoy yourself. Chess can be frustrating because by design you always lose about 50% or your takes, but once you learn to accept the losses, it can be a great mental exercise to keep your brain sharp.

I agree. I would also recommend Daniel Naroditsky's speed run video series. He starts with new account and explains his ideas and thoughts as he progress to higher and higher elo.

Naroditsky has the most accessible teaching videos on YouTube as far as I’m concerned. He’s also writing a regular chess column for NYT.

I really like Yasser Seirawan's lectures on youtube. Its amazing how he can talk about a chess game and make it appear exciting.

He is a fantastic coach and trainer, Bobby Fisher's second in his follow-up match with Spassky, and top ten in the world (1) mid-1990, and with another great coach and writer, Jeremy Silman, author of several great chess books. Three of all the time greats—Kasparov, Karpov, Ivanchuk—were in the top 4 when Seirawan cracked the top ten.

(1) olimpbase.org/Elo/Elo199007e.html

Any tips on handling losses? I’ve become a puzzle only player recently because I end up getting pissed off with myself after a loss

Think of the loss as a form of payment. What it buys you is experience. So whenever you lose, ask yourself what experience that just bought you? What improvement does it allow you to bring into your future games?

If your mindset is to become a better player, rather than winning, then a loss is still a way to gain something. And long term, you'll win more games if you think this way

People will tell you to not care about losing or your rating, but that didn't work for me.

What worked for me is "the rating I care about is my rating in three months from now, not today", which gives space for learning from losses etc.

You don't learn anything with a win. You learn a lot with a loss.

I find a lot of beginners have this mentality and skip over analyzing games they win to their detriment.

In general, the way to get better at chess, or anything really, is all about intentionality.

I'd recommend reviewing every game, win or loss, and looking for things you missed, what your opponent missed, thinking about what your opponent was thinking, why did they play the moves they did, etc.

I'm a Lichess puzzle player. I find it more entertaining than a full game, and can fit a puzzle or two anytime rather than a match (even a bullet game is too draining for a quick time-filler)

Because of how ELO works, your win-loss ratio will pretty quickly normalize to 50-50, regardless of how good you are.

Over time your increased rating will reflect increased skill, but even if your skill was doubled tomorrow, you would still hit a 50-50 W/L because you would be playing people at the same skill level.

However…if you want to feel better, play for a couple weeks and then challenge an occasional player. Once you obliterate them, you’ll feel better about the losses it took to get there. :)

For me the biggest blocker was over-focusing on the numbers going up and down. On lichess you can make all ratings invisible (bottom of the preferences page, "Show player ratings"). This means you can't see your own rating or your opponent's. Your opponent can obviously still see both if he or she doesn't have this option enabled.

I had a very strong coach work with me on this exact problem. He required me to reframe my definition of what it means to win. Basically it came down the the quality of effort I put into the game. If I put everything I have into a game and lose, it now feels like a win, because I know it will make me stronger. Conversely, if I don't give a good effort, but happen to win the game, I count that as a loss. This only applies to longer time control games. I still play blitz now and then for light fun.

I think it's a great approach and I try something along those lines. However it requires some form of self-persuasion which is hard to get when you are just binge-playing quick games.

I feel doing what you advise + playing slower games (for me usually 10min + increment) + doing puzzles is a great combination. It forces me to calculate more variations than just the most likely candidate move, and to think about positions more. I still tilt in blitz a lot but I tilt much less when I follow my own advise.

A couple of points:

* Every time you win, someone else must loose. You should be happy to make the same sacrifice.

* If you loose half your games, you are playing at your appropriate skill level. If you play consistently you will inevitably reach that point.

Make a list of the reasons you get angry, and re-write and filter down to the top two. Write those somewhere and look at it regularly. You'd be amazed at how useful subconscious insights will filter up into consciousness this way.

A world in which only you win chess games would be pretty boring. Just sort of work backwards from that perspective.

Curious, why do you subscribe to chess.com? What does it offer that lichess does not?

For me it’s just leagues better. The UI/UX is nicer, the lessons are nice videos with a roadmap to understanding chess, etc.

The only benefit I ever got from Lichess is that it’s open source which is nice.

The ux is indeed nice but I'm not paying to have stockfish nnue wasm running on my phone.

I personally wouldn't use much more than analysis and I can just get it for free exporting the game.

Puzzles feels like their better quality than lichess but I've heard discording opinions.

For puzzles, Chesstempo was the first site to generate them automatically from games, and it's still the best at them.

I disagree with almost everything you just said, as someone who has bounced back and forth for almost 4 years now.

The poster only mentioned two things. So you answer just makes me think you just don't admire commercial chess sites!

To take the video lessons, chess.com are clearly leagues ahead of lichess. They can pay the contributors to produce quality productions. You can't really open source the time of experts .

I agree with most everything you just said!

Thanks for proving my point those arguing in favor of lichess aren’t being honest

You're welcome? Are you always immediately hostile towards people who disagree with you on niche website preferences?

Frankly, who gives a shit about someone's opinion who can't even handle a comment like 'I disagree with you' without hurling personal insults.

Isn't all open source built from the time of experts? (Not experts in chess, but in programming, design, etc) :)

I mean in theory, nothing prevent a professional chess player to make a nice video lesson and share it for free. And there is no reason to assume this video would not be as good as videos made for money (just like it's the case for software)

We’re talking about chess experts, not programmers

Both platforms are worth supporting. Com does a lot of great events and creates great content, and I like supporting it. I also prefer their UX.

Lichess has Maia bot, some good course material as well, and I like to use my lichess account sometimes as an “alt” where I can experiment with less stress about losing rating. Rating doesn’t matter, but it still makes me queasy if I tilt 100 points while trying out a new opening.

Also learn the "London System", and try play correspondence style games.

Yes! The front-end code for Lichess is what got me to learn Mithril years ago. Really clean code for such a complex application. Here’s a great example:

https://github.com/lichess-org/lichobile/blob/master/src/ui/...

It's decent, but can be cleaner! Better classnames, usage of the classnames library, and type-only imports, off the top of my head.

Related (-ish) is the free and open source Go server [1,2], OGS. A great community, and ad free. I've been playing there since the pandemic started; lately even some professional/tournament games were being hosted there.

[1] https://github.com/online-go [2] https://online-go.com

agree, this is where i play now.

Even their expenses are open source!

https://lichess.org/costs

wow, $409,644.10/year; now I really wonder how much money they make from donations.

Roughly the same amount, I think? They seem to spend what they receive.

$53k per year for main developer salary - from what I understand it’s quite complex Scala codebase.

This site is one of the best things I've seen on the internet. It inspired me to make a similar site for crossword board games (think Scrabble, Words With Friends, etc). See https://woogles.io - also AGPL. The backend is Go-based, and the site has around 6500 MAU (we're about to hit 2M total games). We just released a puzzle mode that is pretty popular and is already making people improve - some of us anecdotally report better word-finding in live tournaments :)

It wasn't obvious to me (though I may have blundered to see/search) from the site where the code is, so to save others the search it seems to be at https://github.com/domino14/liwords ... the repo name underlines the source of inspiration I guess!

This is kind of a side-note, but any time chess comes up on here I smile at the resurgence in interest via Twitch/Blitz. I’m a miserable chess player but I fucking love watching it.

Carlson playing the Botez sisters in Blitz may be a publicity stunt, but the best chess player in the world is also model-photogenic and surrounded by serious fucking players who also photograph well?

Good for the game.

Today there's a really interesting tournament going on between NFL players on the chess.com twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/chess

People like Larry Fitzgerald, Will Davis, and Amari Cooper.

Sorry but I don't see how Carlsen is model level at all. He's nearly actively ugly how his jaw sticks out like he missed his orthognathic surgery as a child.

A lot of professional models are kind of odd-looking; it makes their appearance striking.

I mean sure! I wasn’t referring to Magnus as model-photogenic because of my subjective opinion: I was referring to his mucho lucrative, multi-year deal as the male face of G-Star.

His female counterpart is Liv Tyler, better known as Arwen Udomiel Evenstar around these parts.

Lichess as an application is very impressive, and I use it frequently. The one thing that is somewhat more annoying is the way in which there is a (daily?) restart of the servers, causing strange behaviour in-game. For example, around the restart time, sometimes the restart warning falls away and it seems like you are waiting for the other player to make a move, when in fact you are disconnected.

Is there a reason why restarts happen this way and there isn't traffic draining between servers as they restart one at a time?

There is only one server. Or well, there are lots of servers that make up Lichess but they mostly do different stuff. There is only one main server which handles all the core stuff including games.

Also, restarts usually aren't daily. They generally are around once a week. Though sometimes when a new feature is seeing rapid iterations or an important enough bug is found, restarts can happen a few days in a row.

Everytime I see "lichess" I think of the D&D term – like a female lich.

This is synchronistic. Just a few days ago I started playing on Lichess after I remembered hearing about it here on HN. Actually I haven't played many games there, my favorite thing as someone actively studying to get better is watching live games on Lichess. Its better than Youtube.

Signed up in 2017, and have over 5000 games. It's a great site, all free.

My son and nephew are playing lichess right now. It’s been an incredible summer activity for them!

Current ongoing thread:

Irwin – the protector of Lichess from all chess players villainous - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32047230 - July 2022 (62 comments)

want to sharpen tactical skills and replace wordle at the same time?

https://lichess.org/training/mix

I watch my score float up into the 2000s, get distracted/tired, then float back down...

I do the same, although haven't broken 1800 yet...

Try this: look for pieces that are defended by a single piece, and see if you can force that other piece away. Look for undefended pieces and ways to attack and capture them by attacking/threatening something else - a classic are two undefended projects that one piece can attack (fork).

Also check for "mating nets" where you can get a checkmate or threaten a mate. Often that can force a sacrifice.

Lastly, look for pawn promotions - they can be tricky puzzles but also occur in real matches.

Good luck!

I use the android LiChess app to play my dad, works wonderfully.

Just like to point out that FICS has been going strong for over 20 years!

https://www.freechess.org/

If chess interests you but are looking for a change, try learning to play go/baduk online at https://online-go.com/

- how to play go (beginners) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTWujSwL2bQ&list=PLW5_cMTm0w...

- basic openings/joseki https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLW5_cMTm0wvZOTchMWZag...

- joseki made popular by AlphaGo/AIs (intermediate) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLW5_cMTm0wvZU5pQhmQFw...

[Michael Redmond's Go TV]

I run an education company that has some clubs for kids. One of our families told us about Lichess and used it to start a chess club. We LOVE Lichess and our kids use it all the time at Modulo to play together or with a chess instructor.

We'd love to expand our little group.

If you have a kid (Grades K-12th grade) who wants to play chess with us, please get in touch with me, tell me a little bit about your kid and how you found us on Hacker News and we'll add you to our club! It would be so great to have more fun families playing with us.

https://lichess.org/team/modulo-learning

I want to buy an electronic chess board to play over the board but have each move sync to Lichess for later analysis. Wonder how feasible that is to do.

Any board that allows you to download the games in PGN format can simply be copy-paste into Lichess. Additionally if you have a DGT board and it is plugged into a computer you can sync it directly to Lichess: https://lichess.org/blog/X6l9bBUAACQAXE8M/play-on-lichess-us...

There is the Chessify app, which allows you to point a phone camera at a normal chess board and it will recognize the position and sync with Lichess.

I haven't used it myself and don't know if it handles playing, but it's an interesting idea.

Yea I want to avoid taking a photo of board after every move. Essentially I want one of those boards they use in tournaments like the recent candidates.

I've been using a local engine for analysis. Firstly it saves Lichess CPU time, and secondly it's more powerful (running on GPU). I prefer the Lichess interface so do use it occasionally but otherwise the Nibbler front end over lc0 has been handy. You can paste in FEN or PGN format which as others have mentioned should be available from some physical boards.

I have said it before and I'll repeat it again: Lichess is the best thing that happened to chess since castling.

I’ve always thought that this was an amazing project and I’ve enjoyed many many games on it, but I worry that she may not have put the proper precautions in place to protect her phylactery.

Ah the monthly 'open source is superior to commerical enterprise' hymn.

I use both sites equally and lichess is inferior in pretty much every respect. Assuming you pay of course .

You seem to be the only one making that comparison.

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