"Yeah, but Lichess is all casuals"

@PhillipTheTank

I agree with you when it comes to time controls. Calling 8+ minutes "classical" is a little silly, IMO, too. That said, there are more legitimately classical games played on Lichess every day than on any other server. ICC included simply because the player base here is so much larger. Still, it would be nice to see them handle the ratings the same way FIDE does: Bullet, Blitz, Rapid, Classical.

Blitzin's interface, for those who are used to a command based client, can do more than any other user interface, faster. It's a complicated subject so I won't go in depth but of course it's a matter of opinion in the end. Fritz 15 + PlayChess is a pretty sick combo, too.

Lichess, ICC, and ChessTempo have - by far - the most stable and intuitive interfaces. PlayChess is nowhere near as stable and Chess.com is by far the least intuitive and stable of any site available to play chess on lol.

The problem I have with Blitzin is customization was always limited. There weren't very many options for pieces and squares last time I used it, and you couldn't add any easily. It was very off-putting because I didn't like any of the options for the board (the "smooth" set, which is just the Hasburg font was passable for pieces, but I prefer variety). The command-line client I prefer was one for FICS called BabasChess. Admittedly, since moving to lichess permanently, it's been a while since I've used either FICS or ICC.

@PhillipTheTank

BabasChess - to this day - was my personal favorite and most enjoyable interface to use. I just haven't played on FICS in ages (like 2-3 years. Not since right when I began playing) and moved on like a lot of other people did over time. In it's day, however, I absolutely loved everything about BabasChess.

Since FICS is free I wonder if ultimately lichess will have features linking the two, e.g. players on FICS and players on lichess can play each other from either interface, features from FICS start being available on lichess and vice versa.

Good points about chess.com buying players. It seems like chess.com's paywall has been chipped away at by the competition of lichess. I worry that lichess's success will ultimately be the downfall of sites I like such as chesstempo.

I agree that lichess seems to cater more to "casual play" in the sense that there are tons of options for fast games, but all things about 8 minutes are considered "classical" which is a kind of discrediting mistake (come on we all know what "classical" and "rapid" mean and this is NOT it).

I don't know if the arena format is inherently "casual" or not compared to swiss (no idea, personally). Certainly there is not a huge community of truly classical truly serious competition but I think that's an issue for all online chess. If lichess attacked it, I like lichess's chances as good as any.

You definitely don't have to worry about ChessTempo experiencing any downfall. They're on the rise - now more than ever. It's been a phenomenal site for years and it's like #8 on chesslinks at this point. Way, way ahead of ICC but almost everyone on ICC uses it.

I've had many discussions with the guys who run the site. They have tons of plans for the future, plenty of financial backing, and absolutely no thought of retiring the project any time soon lol. The opposite. Their live chess is actually great. Go give it a try.

It's only $4 a month for the gold sub and you could easily get by with CT's Gold and never buying one Chessbase product. Once again highlighting why Chess.com's price tag is so insane.

Arena tournaments are pretty clearly not serious chess tournaments. One major problem is that players play a different number of games than other players in the tournament, and the number of games you play is dependent not on chess skill, but on how quickly your game ends - this isn't even under your control, but both you and your opponent contribute to it. No way this can happen in a serious competition. Another major issue is that you can berserk, giving yourself half the time you started with in exchange for an extra point if you win. Again, this has nothing to do with serious chess competition. It's just catering to casual video game players. Not saying it isn't fun, just cannot possibly be considered serious.

Well, I will say it isn't fun to me.

I agree with #16 on this point. 15+10 quads/swiss. Something along those lines is much better than arena. No serious chess is played in a format like that.

I will add this: It's really difficult to consistently get games on ICC at this point. They have the pairing pools (which have no increment except for the 25+10 pool which nobody ever wanted) which you can just click on and wait for a game. Naturally, it's human nature to not want to wait so most players who place a seek and don't have it picked up within a few minutes, just click on one of the pool buttons. As a result, the seek graph is 99% just 15/0 or faster and at times only a handful of games being played.

This isn't to say it's as bad as Chess.com which deliberately funnels all players towards ridiculous 3/0 blitz but the low population on ICC is nearly crippling at this point. The people who run the site pretend they're not even aware of it and insist they are one of the busiest sites regardless of what data is shown to prove otherwise.