Women don’t play chess, and when they do, they play badly.

Chess is experiencing a renewed surge of interest thanks in part to The Queen’s Gambit, a Netflix show exploring a young American woman’s rise to world champion. It’s a great show, and it also manages to neatly sidestep any real sociological commentary on what it means for Beth Harmon to be female in this world. However, back in the real world, as a woman involved heavily in the chess scene, the gender politics are much more difficult to ignore.

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Lichess is proud to announce a holiday-season prize tourney, open to all, with a prize fund of 1,000,000 Rubles. (approximately $16,000).

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The December Titled Blitz Arena was one with a little surprise. It was not won by a Grandmaster as usual, but an International Master - IM Minh Le Tuan (@mutdpro) from Vietnam. He was leading the Arena for most of the event and managed to finish with a 12 point lead over second place. This was the third time an IM has won the Titled Arena and the second time for IM Minh Le Tuan. The first event he won being back in September 2018. He is also now the fourth person to win a Titled Arena for a second time.

Second place was taken by GM David Paravyan (@drop_stone), who got to the podium for the first time after playing 14 events. Third place was taken by TA regular, GM Nihal Sarin (@nihalsarin2004). Following on from that, fourth place was anonymous GM @FeegLood with fifth place going to Armenian GM Zaven Andriasian (@Zaven_ChessMood).

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Open-source software dominates the internet, and internet chess is no different. It can't be exaggerated how much easier it is for a developer to build something when they don't have to start from scratch, when they can build on the work of others. With that in mind, Lichess wanted to give a helping hand to a few websites that follow our free and open-source software philosophy. Please give them a try!

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It is some kind of Miracle that before Saturday's event Daniel Naroditsky had never won a Titled Arena. The tournament turns 3 years old in December and throughout those 3 years Naroditsky has finished in the prize places as consistently as anyone without ever taking first.

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A lesson everyone using the internet should learn on day one is to be safe with their accounts. This includes your Lichess account. That‘s why we wanted to write this blog post about how to keep your Lichess account safe. We will talk about four different things to improve security in this article: Safe passwords, two-factor authentication, keeping your email safe and how to avoid phishing.

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Across much of the world, we're entering a second "lock down" to try to stem the progress of COVID-19. Just like in the first major wave in March of this year, it has correlated heavily with more users on Lichess - which is of course bittersweet. While most of the numbers we're hearing in the news lately are somewhat depressing, we wanted to take a moment to share a more positive number. Thank you to all of you, the players, and we're glad we can provide some distractions in this difficult time.

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DGT boards have become ubiquitous in the chess world; electronic chess boards that record and transmit the moves played automatically. They are used to quickly broadcast the moves in World Championship games, but also by online players who prefer to play with a real board and pieces.

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In a very hard fought battle, GM Nihal Sarin (@nihalsarin2004) won his first Titled Arena. Second place, GM @Grey_parrot, remains anonymous. Third place went to TA regular GM Oleksandr Bortnyk (@Night-King96) with 100% berserked games. Fourth Place was taken by anonymous GM @Uzbek005 and fifth by 14 year old GM Raunak Sadhwani (@Raunaksadhwani2005).

This TA was a spectacularly close 3+0 battle over 3 hours. It was streamed by a lot of players. For instance GM Anish Giri (@AnishOnYoutube) and GM Andrew Tang (@penguingim1). Anish Giri started 1 hour late, but still managed to get to 6th place. In this arena it seemed again that berserk is the strategy to go, with a berserk of 32% in total, being much higher in the top 10. With only 2 players in the top 10 with less than 50% Berserk. Although fifth place GM Raunak Sadhwani did manage to get there with 5% berserk only, keeping his streaks alive for a long time. In the end he got the highest win percentage (77%) and also the highest performance (2936) in the top 5.

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The streak of anonymous Titled Arena winners was broken yesterday as GM Alireza Firouzja won the October Bullet Titled Arena, 20 points ahead of second place, GM Daniel Naroditsky. Believe it or not, this represents progress for Naroditsky, from the August edition of the same event where Alireza finished 29pts ahead. GM Vokhidov Shamsiddin took his first Titled Arena prize, finishing third. Fourth was taken by GM Andrew Tang and fifth by today’s anonymous community representative GM FeegLood.

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