Retrospective: 2025 Toronto Lichess Meetup

Some members of the Lichess team; photo: John Upper

On the weekend of October 17th, 2025, some of the Lichess team gathered in Toronto for three days of chess, work, and lots of fun!

Weekend Work

The Lichess Broadcaster App, a desktop app used by tournament organizers to push OTB games to a Lichess broadcast, received some development updates to improve search functionality. Note that since 2025, the app has received many more updates.
Hearing from tournament organizers who use the software, we wanted to make it easier for them to quickly get to the broadcast so they can start transmitting moves. With this change (you can see the pull request here), they can now copy+paste the URL from Lichess and go directly to it.

Work was finally completed on making variant tournaments much more frequent, with the six most popular variants having the hourly tournament coverage increased from one third to two thirds of the time. This improvement to variant tournament availability has been long requested and was well received when this PR was merged.

Some work has also been made on further curating our puzzles, more specifically fixing some issues about mate puzzles not being properly tagged. Furthermore, some players noted it was unfortunate not to be able to download a few of them as PGNs for classes. It’s now possible using a small dedicated webpage. Feel free to post your feedback in the forum; further development might be made if interest is there. Some preliminary work was done to create more official team leagues for Rapid and Bullet time controls, which have now been available for almost a year.

Public Meetup

The Annex Chess Club hosted a fantastic Swiss tournament on Sunday. We played a 9-round Swiss tournament with 64 players. Congratulations to FM Koosha Jaferian and CM Geordie Derraugh for both scoring 8 points. You can see the full results on Chess Results here.

1st Place - FM Koosha Jaferian; photo: John Upper
WCM Olena Kucherenko and CM Geordie Derraugh; photo: John Upper
A wide view of one round of the tournament, with multiple boards in action; photo: John Upper

The club provided 12 DGT chess boards and published over 100 of the games to the Lichess broadcast. Raffle winners won t-shirts, hats, mugs, stickers, and more from the Lichess swag store.

Many thanks to the Annex Chess Club, its organizers, and its members for hosting us.
TD Heidi Gay; photo: John Upper

Toronto Women’s Chess Club

QueenRosieMary was invited to attend the Toronto Women’s Chess Club on the Monday following the meetup, and was able to see firsthand the steps being made to make chess more accessible to women and girls in the Toronto area. She interviewed WGM Anna Burtasova who coaches at the club.