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Lichess: A review of 2024!

ChessLichess
As we say goodbye to 2024, let’s look back at everything we’ve achieved, the impact Lichess has had on chess in 2024, and some sneak previews of what might happen in 2025!

As ever, Lichess would not be possible without the help and support of our community, who contribute in many ways — each being vital for our ongoing work. From donating, translating, developing, maintaining, broadcasting, user supporting, moderating, writing, watching, advocating and playing, every contribution helps us dedicate more time to chess and help grow chess freely and without any boundaries.

Mobile

Back in November 2022, we hired a full-time mobile developer, Vincent, to build new Android and iOS apps from the ground up. Our old mobile apps were built on deprecated technologies, and we mutually decided that just starting again from the ground up would be more efficient than buying into more technical debt with older codebases.

Our new mobile app was released in a beta state earlier in 2024, though they have wide functionality: it’s now possible to play other opponents, do puzzles, watch tournament broadcasts, analyse with Stockfish, watch streamers, browse studies and watch Lichess TV, amongst other popular features.

The features are coming out thick and fast, with Vincent prioritising the most used and most loved features in his developer road map. He’s currently assisted by Lichess’s first intern, mobile developer Julien, and multiple contributors from the community!

Those with Android can download and use the new app now. If you have iOS devices, we’ve got a few more steps to go, but it should be coming to iOS soon.

https://youtu.be/90MtBLUnrJ0

Tournament Broadcasts

It’s been a huge year for Tournament Broadcasts. It’s tough to remember back to January 2024, but the shutdown of Chess24 gave us a massive wave of feedback from a community now looking for a place to follow live tournaments from around the world.

Our broadcast team and developers heard this feedback, and implemented dozens of improvements to our Broadcast page, creating an entire new tournament broadcast suite of tools in the process. In doing so, we empower tournament organisers, give more flexibility to them, foster more innovation, give visibility to more tournaments and allow the community to keep up with more tournaments from around the world.

You can read more about changes made earlier in the year in our dedicated article announcing the changes and our midyear article which covers more of those changes. And since then, we’ve made even more changes!

  • Tournament broadcasts can now be watched on the new mobile app (still in beta)
  • We have made our own broadcast desktop application for tournament organisers, so that you can broadcast games and tournaments directly to Lichess in real-time, basically using Lichess like an FTP server or a service like LiveChessCloud. Use it and give us feedback!
  • Anyone can now embed broadcasts of a tournament to their own website.
  • Broadcasts can now show team layouts and team formats.
  • More information about players names, ratings, and scores are shown
  • Multiple API updates related to broadcasts
  • As with other pages supporting analysis, updated to Stockfish 17
  • Created a broadcast calendar for past and future tournament broadcasts
  • Multiple updates to the UI, including making variations and returning to the main line clearer; maintaining clock states even when exploring variations and side lines.

The features and tools seem to have been a success and widely adopted by the community, with Lichess hosting far more Tournament Broadcasts than previous years:

A massive thank you to all those tournament organisers, DGT operators, the broadcast team, and the spectators of the tournaments for this achievement — and a clear impact to access to chess around the world that Lichess provides for everyone, with no paywalls or other barriers.

Development

This year we had 197 total contributors to our code, helping to improve Lichess and our other tools which impact Lichess, across 34 different repositories (different libraries of code which are different projects, all benefiting or improving Lichess). 140 of these contributors made a contribution for the first time!

It’s virtually impossible to list all of the smaller tweaks, changes, maintenance and improvements Thibault and our developer contributors have made without taking up all the space! We post updates monthly in our changelog, maintained by our dev team.

Some larger changes — aside from those listed in the Tournament Broadcast section and elsewhere in this article — include:

  • A fun feature to see your year in Lichess — have you checked your annual Lichess recap yet?
  • Updating to the latest stable Stockfish release, as well as improvements to cloud evaluations
  • Improvements to how Lichess searches for things in lila-search, making searching faster and more reliable in our backend
  • An upgrade to Scala 3.4.0 to increase optimisation and responsiveness.

Moderation

In 2024 our team received 791,722 reports, including:

  • 174,689 reports for cheating
  • 386,675 reports for communication infractions
  • 164,521 reports for sandbagging or boosting
  • 65,837 miscellaneous reports

These reports come directly from you, our community and users, and help us keep Lichess safe. In addition to user participation helping us keep Lichess safe, we have many automated systems in place. With consideration of those reports and automated systems, some more moderation statistics include:

  • 1,328,371 moderation related messages sent to users (including automated and manual)
  • 196,069 moderation actions taken in relation to fair play (sandbagging, boosting, cheat detected, engine use, includes those from reports and from our automated systems monitoring Lichess)
  • 130,950 accounts closed by moderators for any type of site infraction

Lichess would not be as great to play on without the help of the community, our automated systems, and our human moderators’ great work. We have over 100 moderators, with most donating their time to us, voluntarily. Additionally, thanks to the community’s generosity over the years, we are now in a position where we can pay 12 moderators for regular work monthly, including a Moderation Coordinator who helps keep moderation running smoothly as an area and helps all the other moderators on the stickiest cases. We are only able to do this because of the generosity of our community, so a massive thank you to the chess community, and all of our mods.

Open Database

Each month we publish games to our open game database. It now has over 6 BILLION games; that’s over 4 Terabytes of uncompressed game data!

This game data is used by many researchers and we have started to compile a list of publications that use the data in an effort to understand the impact Lichess has on research.

Currently, we have located around 75 academic works (28 in 2024 alone!) that Lichess has in some way impacted or contributed to — whether they’ve used our game database to train models, used our website for their models to play humans, or other data to see how decisions are made. Interestingly, Google DeepMind has used Lichess data to continue research into chess engines, as have top universities around the world. Many of these research projects and studies would have been difficult for their authors without the freely and easily accessible data Lichess provides!

The data is now also available on our recently created Hugging Face and Kaggle organizations in a format that makes it better suited for data-intensive workflows such as Machine Learning and Data Mining.

Social Impact, Philosophy and Growth

Lichess continues to grow, with Lichess crossing 6 billion rated standard chess games in our Lichess database earlier this year. Millions of users — registered and unregistered — played games, watched tournaments, accessed annotated games, and watched commentary, all for free, without being served ads, tracked, or paywalled in any way on Lichess.

Lichess continues to be one of the largest free (both as in cost, and as in libre) open source (FOSS) communities on the internet, and in the world. Records aren’t maintained on this, but Lichess has probably become the biggest online FOSS game website, and in recent years, likely one of the largest FOSS web app communities.

We don’t have billionaire backers, private equity owners, or a network of influencers with millions of followers — but we have the community, and we continue to develop and work in the way we think best advances the current and potential chess community — while staying committed to the philosophies of FOSS as well as our own philosophies.

Thousands of schools, colleges and universities use Lichess everyday — as part of that, there are over 10,000 teachers using our Class tools to support almost 300,000 students! One of the most touching stories where Lichess has made a positive social impact comes from India, at the orphanage of Chembur Children’s Home in Mumbai, which Theo was invited to visit by Sagar Shah from ChessBase India last year.

Sagar had begun teaching the children at the orphanage how to play chess, with many of them deeply interested and passionate about the game, with some also becoming strong players. Since that visit, a donor in the ChessBase India community has contributed PCs to the Children’s Home, with the orphans now regularly playing online on Lichess! They are now getting to expand their chess horizons and play anyone from all over the world, without their data being sold or monetised, and without paywalls blocking their progress. Since then, some of the children have reached 1900 Rapid and over 2100 puzzle ratings(!) on Lichess, having only learned the rules of chess a year ago, and getting instruction from Sagar’s team once a week.



Children at Chembur's Children Home play on Lichess, using donated computers arranged by ChessBase India (pictures used with permission from ChessBase India, and the Chembur Children's Home).

Finance and Governance

In France, Lichess is formally registered as an association loi 1901, which provides legal recognition, access to banking services, and the ability to employ staff. Every year, our accountants MTLC help us prepare formal accounts, which are then signed off by an independent auditor and submitted for publication in the Journal Officiel Associations. Here are all our published accounts: 2023 / 2022 / 2021.

In 2023, gross income from all sources totalled €650,734, or €576,732 after subtracting payment processing fees. 97% of our income comes from user donations (average €5). Total expenses were €576,900, leading to a surplus for the year of €73,834. Compared to 2022, net income increased by 2 per cent, while expenses increased by almost 40 per cent. The rise in expenses comes from an expansion paid moderation, administrative support and inflation-linked salary uplifts.

Our biggest expenses are payments for salaries and contractors. Community support has enabled Lichess to hire 3 people full-time, 2 substantial part-time workers, and 1 paid intern — the majority of these roles being technical and development focussed. The generous community support also empowers us to contract 21 of our team in different areas (e.g., in moderation, administration, content, and development) to provide some compensation and support for the work they regularly contribute to the site. It is inspiring and humbling for us to think of how Lichess began, and where with the help of the community, we have currently grown to.

Although our 2024 numbers won’t be finalised until the summer, we believe that expenses probably exceeded income for the first time last year. We planned for this possibility, and Lichess’s financial position remains robust. Indeed, we plan to increase spending in some areas in 2025. We will recruit for new positions — potentially including more developers, all to help us respond to emerging risks and opportunities as the world of chess continues to evolve.

We have also made significant progress in incorporating a 501(c)(3) organisation in the United States, which, pending IRS approval, should allow US-based donors to make tax-deductible donations. We are grateful to our community and to the volunteer 501(c)(3) Board of Directors for taking the initiative to set this up, which we believe may help us make a greater impact in the mid to long term.

Content

This year was significant in the chess calendar and for Lichess. We provided commentary on some of the biggest events of the year, including the Candidates, the Olympiad, and the World Championship. We also covered gems of the chess calendar, such as the Qatar Masters, Sharjah Masters, the Casablanca Chess Tournament, and strong new events such as the UzChess Cup, and the Lewis Chess Legends.

We collaborated with many strong and established chess players to provide this content, primarily IM Irene Sukandar, IM Laura Unuk, and GM Felix Blohberger, with a wide range of guests including GM Levon Aronian, GM Matthew Sadler, GM Pentala Harikrishna, GM Aleksandar Indjic, GM Ivan Cheparinov, GM Nils Grandelius, GM Ilia Nyzhnyk, GM Thomas Beerdsen, IM Eric Rosen, IM Divya Deshmukh, and FM Gauri Shankar.

We equally provided written annotations of the Candidates and World Championship Match, primarily by GM David Navara, GM Brandon Jacobson, GM Maxime Lagarde, GM Yannick Gozzoli, IM Lasse Lovik, IM Padmini Rout, all providing excellent and high quality annotations to the public to enjoy and study these historic games in greater depth.

Finally, we were industrious with our written coverage this year, writing 84 articles on chess over the source of the year — our most productive year yet.

What we spend on content helps us achieve our charitable goals to raise the visibility of chess, and give more opportunities for the chess community to study and learn chess from excellent players. But it also allows us to directly give back and reinvest into chess professionals, helping to make chess more financially sustainable for more professionals within chess. This year, nearly 20% of our costs went into making high-level educational chess content, while at the same time, supporting professional chess players.

Other Notable Shoutouts


Not everything fits neatly into a category, but are still worthy of praise — we’d like to highlight a few of those here:

  • Site translation is always important to us, to help make chess fully accessible around the world. In addition to the 90+ other languages we have, Korean, Tamil and Bosnian all hit high levels of completion (90%+) in 2024. Meanwhile, a new translator (many thanks to @cachopoconpatates) has been going hard at Asturian, essentially single-handedly translating it to 40% completion! While Farsi (Persian) has always been a well-maintained language on Lichess, Farsi saw a comprehensive rewrite and many improvements. So, many thanks to the 510 active translators, and the 371 first time contributors this year! If you’d like to help translate Lichess into another language, join us on Crowdin!
  • For the first time in our history, Lichess put together a team which was responsible for DGT setup and transmission, official PGN broadcasting, live camera broadcasting, and commentary production for a prestigious global tournament: the Qatar Masters. It was a great success, giving a new level of visibility to a tournament with already excellent recognition. If you are a tournament organiser and would like to collaborate with us — write to us at contact@lichess.org
  • Lichess collaborated with an official FIDE event, the FIDE World Corporate Championship. As the online partner, we hosted teams from top companies all over the world in online qualifiers, and provided broadcast support to the OTB finals in New York.
  • Lichess was a part of the FIDE Guinness World Record attempt to havemost games of chess played in a 24 hour window. The target of 1 million games was absolutely smashed, with 1.17 million eligible games coming from Lichess alone.
  • As part of a new series of tournaments, Lichess began Streamer Prize Arenas — special prize fund team event tournaments, for our streaming community.
  • The Lichess Bundesliga recently celebrated its 500th edition on December 12th. Overall the league counts almost 2.4 million registrations since its beginning on March 2020. The House Discord Server won the yearly season 2024 closely in front of Dark Horse, overall the fifth time in a row.
  • A lot of small considerations and tweaks behind the scenes — with thought in particular to the rise of low-effort AI spam, and other dark trends of technology being used globally.
  • On March 10th, our team replied to many community questions during a "Reddit Ask Me Anything". If you want to gain some more insights about Lichess, feel free to check it out.
  • Theo gave an interview to ChessBase India with a lot of insights into Lichess. Watch the full thing, or just check out the essentials cut.
  • Some of the Lichess team met up with our users in Berlin!

Many thanks to a great 2024, and we’re looking forward to what 2025 will bring!

Lichess is a charity and entirely free/libre open source software.
All operating costs, development, and content are funded solely by user donations.