Lichess: End of Year Update 2025

First of all, a really big thank you to all of our supporters, contributors and donors. Lichess would not exist or be possible without you! A positive message on social media, or helping volunteer your time, or even a few dollars a month go a long way in helping us flourish and grow.

And we've seen the massive benefits of that across 2025, but especially this December. The community has always donated more around the end of the year, but this December we’ve broken a record: the most donations we've ever received in a single month in our entire history. Due to your kindness and generosity, we received over $80,000 USD this December. This is a major milestone for us!

Thank you, so much, for believing in our work and supporting us to provide free chess for everyone.

New Mobile App

After a year in public beta, our new mobile app was officially released! With broadcasts, games, puzzles, and more currently supported, many in the community and even top players admire the new mobile app. More features and improvements are constantly being worked on and will make it to the new app over time - including offline play against the computer!

The new mobile app has only been possible because of the community. Given an increase in donations sustaining from 2023, we were able to hire Vincent full-time to work on a new mobile app. Thank you to all of our open-source community contributors for their amazing work.

If you haven’t tried it out yet, download our new mobile app from Google Play or the App Store.

Development Updates

Of course it isn't just the mobile app that has received updates. A lot of work has taken place on the website too. Thibault and all of our regularly contributing developers have been hard at work this year, as ever.

Many of these updates were already captured in our August half-year update but since then, there’s been a lot of work too:

We introduced more colours for our Patrons, adjusted our rating system to account for White’s first-move advantage, implemented study search sorting, added various new puzzle themes, provided our own image hosting and markdown for forums, updated our API documentation with new helpful features, and much more! Check out our lengthy changelog for a comprehensive list of changes in 2025.

Thank you to all 166 contributors, especially the 70 first-time contributors, who worked on 1,784 pull requests for our open-source codebase throughout the year!

Thanks to the dedication of our developers and community contributors, we reached another all-time high number of pull requests in 2025!

Tournament Broadcasts

Broadcasts have gone from strength to strength. Once again, we had more tournament broadcasts than ever before! Thank you to all the organisers who trust us and contact us for their tournaments, and to everyone on our passionate broadcast team who make it all possible.

Our broadcast tools make tournaments around the world accessible, with anyone able to make a tournament broadcast simply on the Lichess website and upload the live games through our dedicated, open-source broadcasting software, which is free for anyone to use. Because of this open access, Lichess is the tool of choice for many DGT operators and broadcasters.

In terms of updates, some of the biggest changes have been made to our FIDE pages: adding player photos, showing OTB ratings over time, making it easier to subscribe to players for tournament broadcast notifications, and much more. Other updates include the implementation of tiebreak rules, custom game scores being supported in our broadcast standings, and the ability for every broadcast creator to group their own broadcasts.

To integrate the new photos alongside the player names into our broadcasts, we also had to make changes to our broadcast layout. We took this opportunity to make further improvements for livestream production, resulting in a generally better viewer experience - most notably due to the larger, more visible game clocks.

Many thanks to photographer Brigham Aldrich for generously contributing high-quality photos from the Chess Olympiad! We have also begun sourcing images with open licenses. If you are an accredited photographer and would like to contribute free player photos for our FIDE pages, you are very welcome to reach out to us at events@lichess.org.

In terms of stream production, Lichess appeared in several important tournament streams this year, most notably the FIDE productions for the Grand Swiss, both World Cups, and the Rapid & Blitz World Championships. We have been cooperating closely with FIDE to provide an enjoyable experience, and we are honoured to have the trust of our players and chess organisations alike.

Open Database

All the games that appear on our broadcasts page have also been accessible on our open database. Over 900,000 games are available from our broadcasts, stretching back to 2020.

Additionally, our open database contains every single rated game played on Lichess. There are now over 7 billion rated standard games in our open game database!

These games are also used to generate our puzzle database, with over 4 million puzzles filterable by theme or motif.

Our game and puzzle databases continue to be used widely to support academic research and work. Notably this year, Google DeepMind used our puzzle database to train their own AI to compose beautiful puzzles. If that sounds familiar to you, that’s because last year Google DeepMind used our game database to train a new chess AI. We’ve now compiled over 200 academic papers that were possible due to Lichess’s open data, showing a key way our philosophies give back to society more generally. The open data is released under the Creative Commons CC0 license (and CC BY-SA 4.0 for broadcast games), meaning one can use them for research, commercial purposes, publications, or anything else. One can download, modify and redistribute them, without asking for permission.

Content

Our content area is one of the biggest ways we try to give back to the chess community, providing freelance work and opportunities to players and those in the chess community, as well as a way to experiment with developing new skills or other types of work, while also raising the visibility of the sport and its athletes in general.

Around 7% of our annual spend is dedicated to the commentary, annotations, articles, editing, graphic design and interviews we do from tournaments. This year, this has provided paid opportunities for titled chess players from all over the world, including IM Laura Unuk, IM Irene Sukandar, WGM Petra Papp, WIM Silvia Raluca Sgîrcea, WIM Jesse February, WFM Ellen Nilssen, WCM Katharina Reinecke, WCM Niusha Afshar, GM Toms Kantāns, GM Felix Blohberger, GM Renier Castellanos, GM Mitrabha Guha, GM Rasmus Svane, IM Nitish Belurkar, and IM Piotr Nguyen.

Lichess was proud to be the only platform which covered the Women’s World Championship on-site from Shanghai and Chongqing, obtaining an exclusive interview with the defending Champion, GM Ju Wenjun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHT6eIOzkdw

We continued to cover highlights from the chess calendar, with an on-site media presence at the Sharjah Masters, Abu Dhabi Chess Festival, the first Fujairah Masters, the Grand Swiss, World Cups, London Chess Classic, and Rapid & Blitz World Championships.

This commitment has helped grow our social media channels and increase our visibility to promote free chess for everyone - mainly through our YouTube and Instagram. Consider following or subscribing to stay updated on our latest content and interviews!

Governance and Finance

Some big steps have happened in Lichess over the past year. Due to the community’s sustained generosity, we felt our finances were stable enough to recruit several significant part-time positions within Lichess.

This allowed us to hire a Moderation Coordinator (who helps oversee our 12 moderation stipend recipients, plus a small army of volunteers and contributors), a Content Coordinator (who stewards our social media channels, tournament broadcasts, and our stipend recipients in those areas), an Administration Coordinator (who helps handling the hundreds of emails we receive a day, the 50+ invoices we process each month now, as well as overseeing our stipend recipients in those areas), and our Community Coordinator (who has been handling visibility of community blogs, initiatives, and supporting our streamers and community generally).

Their impact has been significantly noticeable to Lichess throughout 2025, and it's thanks to your support and contribution which has allowed us to rise to the challenge of our ever growing scale and complexity. Our own Director of Operations, Theo Wait, sat down with IM Sagar Shah of ChessBase India to offer a more detailed breakdown of Lichess’s finances.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEbW1Lv1vus

Meanwhile, several members of the wider Lichess community from the USA have now set up a 501(c)(3) organisation, Friends of Lichess. Based in Massachusetts, Friends of Lichess has successfully received tax-exempt status from the IRS, meaning it is recognised as having valid charitable purposes by the American tax authorities, and that it will be applicable for tax-exempt donations for US taxpayers. While it is not currently in a position to accept donations from US residents, we will give an update when there is further progress – probably in the first half of 2026!

Social Impact, Philosophy and Growth

Lichess will forever serve its users and no one else. As a registered charity, we are proud that we can keep providing you with an ad-less, tracker-less, and free user experience. We are also more than ecstatic to know that our message remains being well-received as more and more broadcasters, coaches, tournament officials, amateurs, and professionals alike rely on Lichess for all of their chess needs. In terms of numbers, we now have over 7 billion games played between our millions of users, all while being committed to the four freedoms of FOSS software. We know that thanks to you, we can only grow positively and achieve our charitable goal of promoting and encouraging the play and study of chess and its variants. Indeed, we are hard at work making sure Lichess continues to be adopted by people from all walks of life, serving their eclectic needs as much as possible.

Accessibility

We remain committed to providing a top class chess site that is accessible to all players. Since our half-year update, one of the most important improvements to the non-visual user interface (NVUI) for blind and visually impaired players is support for touchscreen play. One of our own contributors, ikrami1, called a "ground-breaking update to the nvui". We have also worked on providing NVUI puzzle updates, UI tweaks, and general language adjustments, which you can read more about in our changelog.

Site Translation

As for our site’s translation, we have established a better chain between translation feedback and development, which is now reflected on the site. And there is more to come.

This is the first year that we didn't introduce a new language to the website, which is a testament to the support of our volunteer translators for the many languages of the world.

In addition to the help of various contributors who we’ve mentioned in our half-year update, we would like to recognise the following people for their valuable contributions:

• Rohit Jani for getting Gujarati to completion from a very incomplete state
• Zhuge Prajna for thoroughly rewriting our Simplified Chinese translation
• Viola Zsuzsa for reworking and extending Hungarian
• Issa1553 for bringing Bosnian up to date

And special thanks to:

• LeAnn Garza for regular and valuable input on how the original English text could be improved
• The translation managers and proofreaders who supported this year

Moderation

In 2025 our team received 777,691 reports, including:

• 185,997 reports for cheating
• 408,993 reports for communication infractions
• 89,056 reports for sandbagging or boosting
• 93,645 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:

• 1,384,533 moderation related messages sent to users (including automated and manual)
• 191,508 moderation actions taken in relation to fair play (sandbagging, boosting, cheat detected, engine use)
• 143,855 moderation actions taken in relation to communication
• 124,042 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 have been in a position where we can pay 12 moderators for regular work monthly, going on five years now, including our 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.

Events

With the sustained trust of both community organisers, as well as national federations and FIDE, we were able to co-organise and host multiple events, ranging from community / social initiatives, to national championships and even a World Championship qualifier! Here is a short overview of some of the main events of this year:

Credits: FIDE

• Collaborating with FIDE, Lichess hosted exclusively the online qualifiers for the FIDE World Corporate Chess Championship, with 32 teams from companies around the world, and 8 teams qualifying for the OTB stage held in Goa, India.
• Collaborating with ChessMood, Lichess co-organised the ChessMood 20/20 Grand Prix for streamers around the world, with a total prize fund of $20,000 distributed to our streamers’ community.
• As part of our long term collaboration with the Kazakhstan Chess Federation, Lichess hosted online qualifiers for the Kazakhstan Cup (Aktobe and Almaty), as well as the Kazakhstan online National Teams Championship (Open and U16).
• Continuing our cooperation with Sharjah for a second year running, we livestreamed the event with live camera feeds and commentary by our main host, GM Toms Kantāns, and our co-hosts: IM Irene Sukandar (Rounds 1 and 2) and WIM Silvia Raluca Sgîrcea (Rounds 3 to 9).
• Collaborating with FIDE, Lichess hosted the FIDE Social Chess Day Marathon with 20,078 players around the world.

If you are a chess organiser or a national federation and you wish to explore collaborating with Lichess for an event, please feel free to reach out at events@lichess.org.

Lichess Events

Our Lichess events continue to flourish, with more and more events getting added to our busy chess calendar.

Titled Arena

The Titled Arena keeps on delivering thrilling blitz and bullet fun - be on the lookout for the next Titled Arena schedule, which will be published soon!

Streamer Arena

With twelve editions in 2025, the Streamer Arena once again united chess streamers and their communities in lots of competitive chess fun.

Lichess Bundesliga

The Lichess Bundesliga recently celebrated its 600th edition on November 30th. The yearly season 2025 was won once again by The House Discord Server, making it the sixth consecutive yearly win for the team! The new season 2026 started on January 1st.

Lichess Rapid League

Starting from mid-november of this year, we announced that the Rapid League would turn into the official Lichess Rapid League. Congratulations to France-Deutschland Group on winning the 2025 season! The new Lichess Rapid League 2026 season has just started on Monday, January 5th!

Lichess Bullet League

In November, Lichess adopted a popular Bullet League for teams as an official event. The Wednesday 1+0 Bullet team league completes a suite of Lichess leagues for various time controls. To have your team added to the new Lichess Bullet League, please message @cormacobear on Lichess with a link to the team you want added.

Lichess4545 League

The Lichess4545 League Season 47 had its kick-off Arena on January 4th as well. Lichess4545 is always accepting new members, for more info visit: lichess4545.com.

Game of the Month

Our game of the month competition continues to grow thanks to the community's amazing support. With over 100 games posted each month, our team takes careful consideration to judge these games and bring you the Lichess GOTM. Check the General Chess Discussion subforum at the start of the month for the stickied post where you can submit your own brilliant games!

Lichess Meetups

Members of the Lichess team have continued meeting face-to-face to work on the labor of passion we call Lichess. In 2025, we had a large mini-meetup in Nantes, a mini-meetup in Goa at the conclusion of the 2025 FIDE World Cup, and our annual public meetup in Toronto, with a blog post on the Toronto meetup coming along the way!

Some members of the Lichess team at the Toronto meetup. Photo courtesy of John Upper.

Many thanks to all of you for a great 2025, and we’re excited to see what 2026 will bring!