Hikaru Nakamura's Forbidden Platform
lichess.org
lichess.org
Lichess has the best platform to play on and is free to use.
Chess.com is a business. As such they want to earn money. However, without a large, online chess community there will be no subscribers. The amount of effort chess.com has made to sponsor events, streamers etc. is tremendous.
Making a living as a chess professional is tough. Streaming/YouTube has opened the field somewhat: it is no longer required to be in the world top 20 to make a living in the field of chess.
The Chess24 initiative is without doubt inspired by Chess.com. Chess24 gives yet another way for chess players to earn money. Via Chessable (owneed by Chess24) players can sell chess online book/booklets.
If Hikaru has a clause in his contract with Chess.com, that he can't play on Lichess - then the just can't play on Lichess. That's simple.
Would Nike be happy if Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo suddenly appeared in Adidas shoes?
It works the other way too: Wen did you last see Magnus play on Chess.com? [I am aware that Magnus as owner/investor in Chess24 makes his own rules - and plays on Lichess]
how about if Ronaldo appeared wearing shoes given to him by a charity?
Well... it is happening the other way round, with runners wearing Nikes and painting over them to try and not annoy their other brand sponsors: https://www.businessinsider.com/nike-vaporfly-shoes-runners-...
The answer may very well still be "no, they would not be happy," but I bet the public reaction to being forbidden from a public tournament would be different than if he were just punished for wearing the wrong shoes one day.
That said of course a contract is a contract, and it's probably something Hikaru should have considered in taking it. He likes to push the envelope though, which is respectable in its own right. I'm happy to just watch the drama with popcorn in hand. (After all, he's doing this for content right? he's shrewd, surely considered the positives and negatives.. don't underestimate what he stands to make from content, it could very well compete with what he gets from sponsorship, for all I know.)
It'd be more like if Lichess were funded by Nazi gold or something, and the person funding it was trying to do so because they want you to forget they stole a ton of Nazi gold.
PGA isn't behaving this way for moral reasons, but it's an extra component to that situation which makes this harder to analogize.
I see your point. Chess played on the internet is an e-sport. So let's compare it to Fall Guys and Stumble Guys.
If a streamer is paid to advertise Stumble Guys, Kitka Games would be annoyed to see Fall Guys being played.
It'd be more like if you could chose to play CoolGameThatPeopleLove on for-pay servers owned by a company known for sponsoring a bunch of really good players who play exciting games and who you would _love_ to have a chance to play against, or play on community-run server with people who are great, sure, but they're just randos on the internet just like you. You can either pay and feel like you're part of the big league, even if you'll never play the big players yourself, or you can pay nothing and just play the community because you don't care about big name players.
But then a big name player who you could never hope to even accidentally play decides "fuck it, why not?" and starts streaming themselves playing on the same free server you play on! That's amazing!
But not for the sponsor: the whole reason they sponsored this person is because they were very intentionally (through their sponsor contract) made unavailable as an opponent to the world at large, effectively using them as an incentive to join the paid platform. It directly damages the paid service if that player even connects to the community service under their public, adored, identity.
(Crucially in this setting, no one "owns the game", instead they "own" part segments of the player base)
Back when Nike Vaporfly came out and the other shoe manufacturers de facto didn't have an answer yet, you would see e.g. Puma-sponsored athletes in Nike shoes. It's simply better for Puma to have Puma athletes win (quietly) in Nike shoes than to have them lose in Puma shoes.
Jordan had a clause specifically exempting him from any restrictions around playing basketball - by his contract, he could play basketball in any league, or even any scrimmage, exhibition, or pickup game.
I think that the chess world could do with more money so I have nothing against a site providing a revenue stream, even if their actual aim is to profit themselves.
It would be disappointing if chess.com are engaged in clandestine anti-lichess behaviour. There might already be some information out there that I'm not aware of.
Hikaru is the biggest name in chess streaming. If he's signed an exclusivity contract with chess.com that would be unfortunate, but whatever it's just one person. If chess.com have started to to add exclusivity into all of their streamer contracts then that would be much more unfortunate. It's seems likely that they do have other exclusivity contracts, perhaps Gotham or the Botez sisters. Although you could argue that "they have the right", by a similar vein we have the right to hold it against them.
> It works the other way too: Wen did you last see Magnus play on Chess.com?
Actually, I don't get your point here. Ideally players would be free to make their own decisions on an ongoing basis, which is what we assume Magnus is doing.
> Actually, I don't get your point here. Ideally players would be free to make their own decisions on an ongoing basis, which is what we assume Magnus is doing.
In this respect Magnus doesn't think like a player. As owner/investor of Chess24 why advertise Chess.com? He sticks to Chess24 and once in a while to Lichess.
Who broke the news that Magnus wasn't going to play Nepo? Chess24 of course - not a coincidence.
I take it from this discussion that this is not so common in the chess world. If that is the case, then chess is missing out.
About 10 weeks ago.
https://zwischenzug.substack.com/p/magnus-dominates-titled-t...
I figure all this spending on sponsorship and GM content is why the rest of their site is so inferior to Lichess. Lichess can spend all their time perfecting the platform, and it really shows.
At core there is a dichotomy between Chess.com's business-model-ish approach and Lichess' communist approach... to put it in Thibault's own words.
No freemium tiers. No subscription plans, ads, etc. Just donations. That approach has been good for keeping the UX lightweight and snapy.
Chess.com has been around longer, so Lichess' is still catching up with features. I quite enjoy having them both compete as they are.
You know, in for a penny...
Level 1000 puzzle: obvious pattern move is correct, no surprise.
Level 1400: obvious pattern move is correct, but you have to check a potential threat unless you are guessing.
Level 1800: obvious pattern move is incorrect, need to notice the threat and findnthr better move.
In Thibault's case, he has consciously and deliberately made it so that his political views do affect choices at all levels. A lot of it is quite direct. If you are "communist^," then you think differently about login, data retention. You make feature decisions differently. You also make hiring/expansion/strategy decisions differently.
Chess.com needs to worry about free-paid conversion rates, crippling features to differentiate subscription plans, analytics people/code to tie it all together. Those require code, infrastructure. They come with performance costs, technical debt. Thibault has explicitly identified these, and deliberately carved advantages out of them. What can you do with much less bloat.
Even just having more money has disadvantages, besides the obvious advantages. You now have teams and senior people responsible for analytics, commercial performance, an extensive (and restrictive) streamer sponsorship program. You have a bigger accounts dept. etc. Modern companies have a lot of bloat, and administrative analogues to technical debt.
That stuff inevitably leads to a difference in product, even if you had the exact same programers. Environments matter. Thibault is trying to win. I like it.
^I'm going to call this ideology "Thibault Communism" to keep it narrow.
I don't see what's communist about it. It's just that the developer has arrived at "charity" via the route of communism. The biggest societal difference is that chess.com allows people to play chess for a living, whereas a free platform does not.
> Save the trees
> Maker of lichess.org, a hippie communist chess server for drug fueled atheists
TD is the one who who articulated it this way, and there are pretty strong logical and operative links between his ideas and actions.
There are lots of differences between chess.com and Lichess, societal and otherwise.
Anyway, I'm not claiming that Lichess is superior in every way, just that it's great and unique. There are lots of successful companies/startups/sites operating on the chess.com mindset. Lichess is quite unique.
You can debate all other surrounding stuff being influenced by the author's politics but this one is purely about him being able to implement it and the commercials competitors failing spectacularly.
It's not unique to Lichess btw, back in the day ICC had smooth, responsive gameplay as well. It was commercial and it was great.
That's just not true. I've been using both for a long time and chess.com has more intuitive UI. I frequently find myself exporting my games from lichess into chess.com simply because the latter offers superior game analysis experience.
But it does so once per day, unless you pay (the low depth analysis you get for free on chess.com is not great to put it mildly)
This is just mindblowing to me. It's not just that I disagree but I think the opposite is true, and by a very large margin too. I guess people just have different preferences when it comes to UI but especially for fast time controls, I don't get how people put up with chess.com, it's outright unusable for me.
Prominent example when you click "Play" you go to https://www.chess.com/play and get presented with a chess board. At this point, it actually lets you make an initial move. But you're not playing anyone! You then need to click, for example, "Play online".
The rest of the site is disorganised. For example there's stuff under "Learn" and "Resources" and I can never remember where to find things.
Also, does chess.com have anything similar to https://lichess.org/insights/yourusername or https://lichess.org/analysis#explorer where you can select "Player" and see how openings play out for your games only (as well as masters and the whole of lichess of course)?
(for the obtuse, replace "yourusername" above with your actual lichess username)
I have a lot of friends with a mere passing interest in chess, and most of them had naturally ended up on chess.com. They had never heard of Lichess. But invariably once they tried it they all said the same thing: lichess is much more intuitive and easy to use.
As for analysis, I think computer analysis is not actually very helpful anyway, unless a lot of effort is put into analysing the computer lines and discarding those that you couldn't possibly be expected to find. Most people who use computer analysis don't do this, and they walk away with the wrong conclusions. Chess.com might have a better experience for getting those wrong conclusions, I don't know. And hell, analysing blitz and rapid games is a waste of time anyway, other than looking up opening improvements.
The only analysis I do on Lichess then is mostly looking at the opening in blitz games where the opening went wrong for me, and maybe seeing if I missed a tactic in some position I was unsure about during the game. Lichess is perfectly fine for that.
Completely untrue, I've played on both and the UX + post game Analysis, video content library, etc is far better on chess.com.
I do hope lichess.org is able to improve and find better monetization options that's able to pay for more dev + UX resources, championship prizes + GM commentators which makes watching chess far more entertaining.
it’s not hard to find, but you have to seek it out, whereas chess.com shoves it in your face and tries to get you to pay for more
I don't think there's any seeking out necessary - you have 3 things to click on after a game - rematch, new opponent and analysis. Like is there really a user demographic that (1) is interested in game analysis and (2) doesn't notice or understand the button that's shown as an option at the end of every game?
You do have to seek it out. Even when you click on analysis, you still have to activate the engine and select a move back in time to start seeing arrows and whatever the score advantage thing is called. It's not rocket science, but you're not handheld and it's certainly not "analysis" followed by a PowerPoint of what great and terrible move happened; it's self-analysis with Stockfish.
In the end I came to prefer Lichess' analysis board, but I think they'd have to gain walking you thru it better. I kinda doubt my father, who's not a dumby nor Internet-illiterate, would find it intuitive as it is. A highlight real of important move would seemingly be trivial to implement while also being straightforward to follow for anyone clicking on analysis for the first time, bringing them to dive in the self-analysis board. It would take nothing away for those who want to flicker thru their whole games, just remember a toggle option.
You make it sound like chess.com shoves heaps of dark practice's IAP in your face, which isn't true, after I've paid for a subscription [1] I've seen no more paywall content or any more monetization options, I get full access to their sub content & features, which because it's great value and tastefully done, I intend to re-subscribe next year if I'm still playing by then.
in lichess you can computer analyse the board as many times as you want, for free, without even needing an account. the only catch is that you might not notice the feature if you weren't looking for it.
chess.com shoves it in your face, lets you do a few analyses, and then asks you to pay for more. whether that is still the case after you've already paid for more isn't really the point
When people say the opposite, it seems to always be people who have been chess.com customers for years, suggesting a possible post-purchase rationalisation
There’s a lot of incidental stuff I dislike in lichess’ UI, but at the end of the day chess.com offers lots of stuff to learners (straightforward reviews, with recent game review features offering _why_ moves are good)
But hey, more power to everyone! Just tired of people going out of their way to claim that chess.com is garbage. I’m glad lichess exists and will play some games on it. But there’s a reason that chess.com has more users and it’s not just the domain name.
Not gonna happen. Lichess is simply not this kind of product. It's like the Wikipedia monetization
I play on both, but I often find myself going to chess.com to analyze a lichess game, and I don't think I've ever done the opposite.
When I open the app and look for a 10/0 match though, I always find one right away, and this + cursory game reviews covers ~100% of my use case, so shrug.
I disagree and I play almost exclusively on Lichess. In chess.com you can:
1. set up multiple pre-moves and
2. play several variants that aren't in lichess, including 4-player chess (this is mostly the reason I sometimes use chess.com).
I prefer lichess, but just can't have that experience so I pay for chess.com.
I much prefer Lichess' system for Bullet.
Cheds.com supports more game modes / variations (bughouse and puzzle rush are two favorites!), better social features, built in lessons and lectures you can buy or subscribe to, the client is snappy and lets you set up a sequence of premoves instead of just one, etc.
Lichess also has some killer features of it's own: everything is free, including tournaments, the titled arenas are nice, the analysis tools are free and easy to use, etc.
There doesn't have to be just one platform. A paid and open source platform can both offer different value propositions even if there's some overlap.
I love lichess.org but make no mistake: without the dedication of one talented Scala programmer willing to underpay themselves that site would not exist.
Commercial sites can provide more services and offer more opportunities to chess professionals simply due to the funding model.
Disclaimer: I've played over 100k online chess games since 1992. Starting with original ICS (client was on Xwindows) before ICS/FICS split drama, then chessbase.com, then chess.com and now lichess.org. I slightly prefer lichess but play on chess.com as well.
You're pretty much spot on. My average game length is 5 minutes and 7 seconds. lichess tells me my time spent playing is 54 days, 5 hours and 6 minutes and now 15,273 games.
It works out to average just under an hour a day, and I play most days.
Breakdown: 6,157 bullet (90+% are 1+0 but a few 2+1) 7,430 blitz (90+% are 5+0 but a few 3+2) 1,368 rapid (99+% are 10+0) 184 classical (100% are 30+0)
I've also played a small handful of correspondence, chess960, etc. which is why it doesn't quite add up.
You said you don't analyze your games? Is there a standard methodology for analyzing chess games, especially given that everything being discussed here is happening electronically?
I would be fascinated to hear about how people are combining technology with the practice of chess to ramp up their learning efficacy.
Further, you can easily compare your responses during openings to what master level players play and you can also just look at how effective certain opening lines are just for your own games.
Lichess also has an "insights" feature where you can look at all your games in aggregate and ask questions like "how often do I win playing Ruy Lopez opening compared to when I play the Italian opening", etc.
These sites also have endless tactical puzzles which you can practice with.
I guess deliberate practice to improve consists of some or all of these tools plus studying certain aspects such as end games and openings.
I'm too impatient to do any of these which is why I improve very slowly despite playing thousands of games.
Takes roughly an hour on 3 0 controls. There are days when I play 20 and some days when I play none.
Is there a corelation between games played and rating? Probably some but you hit diminishing returns at some point. As Botvinnik said - blitz rots your brain.
Over the years I have noticed some rating inflation on online chess sites. My high on lichess is 2670 and 2620 on chess.com. On older services I never broke 2500 and my highest OTB rating as an FM was 2398.
Still it is a bit of addiction and I try to limit myself to 4 - 6 games in one sitting.
Same when I played World of Warcraft in HS. Had probably multiples of that total playtime. I got "nothing to show" for all that time. But it was time well spent I feel. I had fun, and it's where I would hang and chat with friends during the evenings etc., so no regrets.
Some people have days of time driving 4x4s, or sitting on the beach, or reading a book. Do you consider all of that time "wasted" also? (hint, it isn't, for that person)
There are many chessplayers who think lichess > chess because it is absolutely free. That is not a sufficient condition for greatness. Having a paid model is not a horrible thing.
It is not given that a nice FOSS project is sustainable. There are plenty of free projects which went nowhere.
Only a handful FOSS projects can support themselves (vue, lichess and very few others).
Even worse, there are many formerly great FOSS projects half-abandonded when the original creator decided to get a "real job". That is what worries me with lichess - the bus factor of one.
Yes I have lichess repo on my computer but that is not sufficient.
As I have grown older I've come to appreciate the value of paying for things well made.
There are only people working with him, he's not alone in the project. And other people have access to the servers so even if he dies suddenly without having time to do a hand-off the project could still continue.
With opensource tools businesses often do contribute back, via their paid employees.
This is because the business wants to use the tool, but wants some new features / bugfix, and the opensource license means they legally have to contribute back to the opensource project if they want to add that feature and keep using the project.
With lichess the players are almost entirely just consumers of a free product.
> Open source in general wouldn't exist without lots of people who contribute and underpay themselves for it
If you want proof this statement is wrong just look at the open source companies that were created by for-profit companies, such as React by Facebook, Visual Studio Code by Microsoft, or Golang by Google. These are some of the biggest opens source projects, developed by very highly paid software engineers.
All that said, of course there is many OSS projects out there maintained by some unpaid person doing it out of the kindness of their heart.
It goes both ways of course, when a business open sources their project they benefit from the contributions of others.
I feel similarly. I play mostly on Lichess but chess.com has features which I feel are easier to use, so I use both. I find this either/or discussion to be strange since both have their strengths and weaknesses. It's a pittance for anyone working in tech to support both, and the competition has largely been amazing for the improvement of both services.
It's interesting how 27 years ago the same type of drama happened, even when FICS (the free option at the time) was a carbon copy of ICC, AND you could connect to either with the same clients. Somehow people still found ways to say one was better than the other up until the point where they became sufficiently differentiated and the discussion largely stopped.
It almost feels like the Wikipedia vs Encyclopedia Britannica argument. Chess.com just feels like a company driven on profits whereas lichess has made adjustments to be reasonable about their own OpEx costs (specifically just the controls on game analysis and not wasting compute).
I really respect and appreciate the work lichess does.
In other areas of funded open source, developers are kept on leash, where those with money or foundation seats order the work horses to comply.
Many of the ostensibly OSS-glorifying tweets of the powerful are as nauseating for insiders as the chess tweet cited in the blog post.
But damn did this make me like them even less.
The problem is that companies like chess.com and chess24 tend to sponsor these things, and they're in direct competition with lichess.
The evidence points that it is pretty far from being able to sponsor chess players and let them make a living from doing what they love, like a commercial platform could do.
Instead of individual streamers being sponsored by venues, which then forbid them to play in other venues, they could be sponsored directly by the advertisers who sponsor the venues, and agencies could represent/group them. Just like how it works with e-sports. Riot Games for example doesn't pay all the pro players to exist, there's a whole ecosystem.
I'm still reeling from Dirty Tricks (2021) peeling back the lid on bridge drama.
From my point of view, it is all good, and I am happy to see players getting compensated any way possible. BTW, Nakamura is especially entertaining!
Also, i find the UX generally better and less clunky, but that's personnal preference and is subject to change.
It's snappier, and there are some analysis features that are better than the com's free offering.
But overall, if you pay, the com is a much more complete and rewarding experience.
In what ways?
I switched to lichess while my diamond chess.com membership was still running. I definitely don't agree with this assessment.
I don't like playing on lichess as much because lichess provides a product for free that they should charge money for
This reminded me I should donate to lichess.