Some Puzzling Analysis
A quick look at how the new puzzle system is going!
The new puzzle system has been live for almost a month now and we wanted to take stock with a quick analysis, as well as introduce a new feature!
Lichess Official Blog
Daniel Naroditsky wins the first Bullet TA of the year
...and for (surprisingly) only his second time!
After having won his first Titled Arena last November and getting on the podium 9 times before, GM Daniel Naroditsky (@RebeccaHarris) won his second Titled Arena. Second place was taken by IM Toivo Keinanen (@toivok3). Anonymous GM @Grey_parrot got third with a phenomenal performance of 3143. Another anonymous GM @Wild-King91 took fourth place and IM Minh Le Tuan (@mutpro) finished in fifth place.
Introducing Maia, a human-like neural network chess engine
A guest post from the Maia Team
We're happy to announce Maia, a human-like neural network chess engine that was 100% trained on Lichess games. Maia is an engine built in the style of Leela that learns from human games instead of self-play games, with the goal of making human-like moves instead of optimal moves. In a given position, Maia predicts the exact move a human will play up to 53% of the time, whereas versions of Leela and Stockfish match human moves around 43% and 38% of the time respectively. As a result, Maia is the most natural, human-like chess engine to date, and provides a model of human play we will use to build data-driven chess teaching tools.
Return of the GMs
Grandmaster Oleksandr Bortnyk won the first Titled Arena of the new year on Saturday, and his second Titled Arena ever after winning one last August. Like his last victory, this event proved to be an extremely close affair with only 5 points separating 2nd and 3rd place from the leader. The 15+ point gap between the rest of the top 10 and first place might suggest that the top 3 was stable throughout the event. In reality, it was highly contested, with many players trying to stake their claim.
Lichess End of Year Update 2020
Keep on keeping on.
It's safe to say that everyone will remember 2020 for the foreseeable future, and mostly not for pleasant reasons. The global pandemic has affected us all significantly, and we are certainly wishing everyone a much better 2021! Still, at the end of the year it's important to take stock and be grateful for any good points we can find. For example, Lichess celebrated its 10th birthday this year!
Perhaps unsurprisingly, with a large portion of the world in lock-down online chess has seen an incredible increase in players, and it has been no different for Lichess. In fact, back in March and April we were running to keep up with demand as the player base doubled over the space of weeks, and we scrambled to streamline the code and get additional servers. We're happy to say that we're now handling the massive traffic easily, with peaks of over 110,000 players online!
New Puzzles are here!
The wait is over.
It is with great pride that Lichess is finally able to announce our new puzzle system. Give it a try here.
Titled Arena Announcement(s)
Announcing our schedule for upcoming Titled Arenas!
We're pleased to announce a 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 and variant.
2020 Crazyhouse World Championship Grand Final
A titanic confrontation.
The Grand Final of the 2020 Crazyhouse World Championship organised by JannLee with a $2000 prize fund is upon us! It takes place over 3 days: Tuesday 22nd, Monday 28th & Wednesday 30th December at 20:00UTC. The Challenger Jasugi99, NM Janak Awatramani from Canada, was the runner-up to JannLee in 2017 under his old handle TwelveTeen. In 2020, he emerged from a field of 142 participants, coming top in a round-robin of 12 Candidates with an incredible win percentage of 85%. The reigning World Champion is IM opperwezen, Vincent Rothuis from Holland, who beat JannLee in the 2018 Final and again to win the bullet zh world championship in 2019. Jasugi99 & opperwezen will play 60 games of 3+2 crazyhouse (so 20 games and about 2 hours each day). All three days will be live-streamed by JannLee on Twitch, co-commentating with Mugwort, Kleerkast and the great man himself, crazyhouse aficionado GM Yasser Seirawan!
Grandmasters are overrated
Revenge of the under-titled.
On Saturday IM Minh Le won his second straight Titled Arena. He added a bullet Titled arena victory to his Blitz Titled Arena victory from 2 week ago. This was his third Titled Arena victory overall among many other finishes in the top spots. There is a long tradition of IMs performing well in Titled Arenas. Names like Opperwezen and MeneerMandje come to mind, players who have never looked even slightly out of place among GMs. It’s only natural since what you need to do to get a GM title and what you need to do to get a 2800 Lichess bullet rating do not align precisely, even if many of the same people do both.
Stockfish 12 on Lichess
Shorter waits for stronger analysis
Three months after its groundbreaking release, Stockfish 12 (or rather the current development version of Stockfish 13) is finally available on Lichess, for both server and client side analysis.
If you’re not interested in all the technical details, here’s a short summary: