Welcome to the new Lichess! We have been working extra hard in the past few months, and we are quite proud of the result. We hope you will love it as much as we do.
Changes are mostly cosmetic, and all your beloved features are still here. All your data is still here. Lichess is still 100% free, without ads or tracking. We made lichess work on mobile browsers, and we added a few features in the process!
A long time ago, on a chess server far far away...
After two very successful 960 events, it is finally time to play some proper chess. Position 518, where the starting piece positions actually make sense. The latest editions have been won convincingly by the Doctor. Will he be victorious yet again, or is time for a new king to rise and take the throne? Winter is coming.
Hear me, and rejoice! Are you tired of spending hours upon hours on an educational study that no one will see? Do you want to share your analysis with the good citizens of lichess? Do you want to show off your coaching skills? Say no more.
Introducing Lichess Curator.
After an overwhelming amount of feedback we have finally been able to fix the pawn bug that has been plaguing both online and over the board chess for hundreds of years. Until now the bug has been shamelessly exploited in about 3% of all games played on Lichess.
The lead developers have been working night and day trying to find a solution. Only recently they discovered a new type of technology that allowed us to motion track realistic pawn movements.
The most recent edition of the Chess960 Titled Arena showed that the title you have isn't all-defining, with some great showings by non-GM masters! Here's a fun tactic from the warm-up event to whet the appetite (white to play, see if you can spot it - and a bonus challenge, would you play it after only 8 seconds?)
Lichess is organising two community meetups! The first will be in London on Saturday 6th April from 18:00 to 22:30 UTC (Correction: UTC+1/BST) at The Hillgate pub and feature a blitz tournament; and the second will be in Montréal at the end of June (~28th or 29th with the exact details to be confirmed)!
Over a year since the inaugural Titled Arena, we decided to mix things up with our first ever Titled Arena in Chess960. Chess960 is a chess variant where the back rank pieces for both sides can start in any of 960 different combinations - throwing opening theory out of the window and leading to some extremely sharp (and sometimes peculiar) positions right from the off! A total of 4 of the 2649 games played started from the standard position, but the majority of course were unknown territory. As such, it was only fair to increase the time control to the sedentary pace of 2+1 - but this didn't deter some competitors who proceeded with berserk rates of over 70%. An interesting effect of the time control was that we saw far more berserking than 1+0, despite the loss of increment making it theoretically an even more berserk decision! We don't yet have the statistics in on if the number of computer mice broken in a rage was reduced as a result, but we hope so.
The event started with many players balanced out of the gate - taking longer to string the wins together. Mystery GM Watneg took an early lead, stringing an impressive 8 wins together. Meanwhile, Magnus managed to cling on for a win on time while down a full rook, but then failed (just) to do the impossible again after getting his Queen trapped 4 moves in against IM MeneerMandje - losing 113 rating points in the process. GM Watneg and IM opperwezen continued to trade places in 1st and 2nd over the next half hour, with the latter taking the victory in their first meeting.
Due to the recent gain in popularity of the Chess960 (or Fischer Random) variant, we're hosting a bonus Titled Arena: Chess960 Edition! The Titled Arenas has become among the world's strongest Bullet tournaments, and we're proud to now also offer a high quality Chess960 tournament to our players (actually, we announced it in a series of mysterious tweets a couple of weeks ago).
Many of you have also requested a longer time control during these titled events, so we're trying 2 minutes + 1 second increment this time. Moreover, to ensure that each player will get enough games with this longer time control, we're increasing the tournament duration from the usual 2 hours to 3!