As another year passes, we want to share some highlights of our work, achievements and projects over 2023. 2023 has been a year of massive community growth for us. Much of what we have achieved this year simply would not have been possible without so many people who have kindly donated their time to us, and so many people who have generously donated money to support our projects and goals. From January 2024, we will continue our work in an online chess landscape that is marching towards a monopoly. This trend is not unique to chess – consolidation is happening across the internet and wider world. But Lichess remains strong in spite of these challenges. We’re a charity that’s run by the community, for the community. Every cent donated to us is reinvested directly back into chess more widely; none goes to investors, shareholders or private equity firms. It’s your support that has helped us outlast competitors with countless millions of dollars in investment and equity-backing, and your belief in our mission and purpose that helps to inspire us every day. Support us today to help ensure free chess, for everyone, forever. 

Continue reading this post

Lichess has always been open-source, and it's always been possible to download and run its code. However, that hasn't always been easy to do. Lichess has a lot of dependencies that need to be installed and quite a few background services that need to be running. Coordinating everything on your own machine in real-time can be difficult.

But now we've massively simplified the process of setting up a complete development environment and running lila, the primary Lichess codebase that's written in the Scala programming language (lila is short for "Lichess in Scala").

Continue reading this post

As mentioned in our announcement, the Pavlodar Open (third event of Kazakhstan Cup) granted three invitations with all expenses covered, to be awarded by a series of tournaments held on Lichess. Nine arenas in total were held within a week, at different times of the day, allowing players all around the world to compete, with the participation varying from 1600 to 4500 players each. With more than 100k games played, and only the top 20 from each arena qualifying, the competition was fierce, and many strong players had to play more than one qualifier to get a chance to go through.

Continue reading this post

At the beginning of September, over 20 Lichess team members met up in Barcelona for what turned out to be the largest team meetup and community event held so far.

Meetups are a fantastic opportunity for contributors to meet each other and collaborate across all areas of Lichess. They’re like extended hackathons but with less sleep deprivation and better food – it helps that some team members like to cook… while others can only be trusted with the washing up! There’s usually time to fit in some sightseeing too, but the highlight for many is a community event in a public space where people can play casual OTB chess (or just hang out). 

Continue reading this post

Starting 22 October, Pavlodar in northeastern Kazakhstan will host a nine-round classical open tournament with a whopping $50,000 prize fund up for grabs.

Continue reading this post

We're pleased to announce the schedule for our upcoming Titled Arenas!

All events will be preceded by a warm-up arena open to all players with a minimum of 20 rated games in the relevant time control (excluding 960 warm-up, where the minimum rated games are 10).

Continue reading this post

This article contains potentially distressing content.

Continue reading this post

In the end, the Women’s World Championship was a tale of two halves. In the first half of the match, held in Shanghai, the challenger Lei Tingjie looked untouchable, giving virtually no chances for the defending champion Ju Wenjun and taking a one-game lead.

Continue reading this post

(Photo: Stev Bonhage, FIDE)

Ju Wenjun stared at her position, a bishop-down endgame, for several seconds before extending her hand in resignation. Normally at this level of chess she would have resigned several moves earlier, but Ju seemed reluctant to concede the game in a match where wins have been exceedingly hard to come by.

Continue reading this post

As mentioned in our introductory blog, the Uralsk Open (second event of the Kazakhstan Cup) decided to grant an invitation to four players, selected by a series of events held on Lichess. The first stage was divided into twelve blitz arenas which took place in a week, with starting times staggered over 24 hours, to allow for participation across the world. More than 175k games were played in this stage, many of which were already of a very high level: several strong titled players joined the event, along with over 35,000 total players! The fight for the top 20 was intense, and several strong titled players were forced to play more than one tournament to qualify for the second stage.

Continue reading this post