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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.