The Lichess Titled Arena had its strongest field yet, setting a record for total number of participants (188) and GMs (31). However, even the stronger competition was not sufficient to stop World Champion Magnus Carlsen from winning his third straight title by a commanding margin of 62 pts. Afterwards, Magnus again donated his prize back to lichess to be used for the next edition’s prize fund. When will the chess world be able to produce a bullet player strong enough to take the prize money away from him?

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From the 14th to 18th February, 12 Lichess developers and staff members met up in Oslo, Norway (not Minnesota). With five nations represented, it was great to meet each other in person while discussing future Lichess challenges and developing new fixes. There were also plenty of opportunities to play lots of chess, with bughouse becoming the most played variant amongst the Lichess team in breaks between other work.

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The two previous Lichess Titled Arenas were a huge success. 148 titled players played in the previous one, including Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana. Magnus donated his first prize back to Lichess (again!), so this time we'll have a jackpot first prize of $1500. We also received a generous donation of $200 specifically earmarked for this tournament, so we increased the prizes for places 2 through 5 as well.

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The FischyVishy Crazyhouse World Championship (CWC) is back! After the success of last year's tournament, which saw 64 participants competing for their chance at the crown, it's now time to continue keeping this variant fever alive!

The incumbent crazyhouse world champion is JannLee. A 64- or 128-player knockout will be played to determine 8 Candidates who will then play a round robin Candidates tournament. In the Candidates tournament, the 8 participants will be joined by TwelveTeen, the challenger to last year's crown. Finally, the best-scoring candidate from the Candidates tournament will play a match against JannLee.

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We set a new record in our second Titled Arena, with 145 titled players playing 3448 games!

Carlsen seemingly has an infinite number of pseudonyms to pick from. This time around, he eschewed “DannyTheDonkey” in favor of “DrDrunkenstein.” Under this pseudonym, Carlsen completely dominated the field, finishing a staggering 67 points ahead of bullet monster GM Andrew Tang, who finished second. Completing the podium we see another lichess bullet regular, IM opperwezen finishing in third place. If you missed the tournament, you can watch ChessNetwork's coverage on Twitch (tournament starting on 1:05:15).

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Chess is becoming increasingly popular on streaming sites like Twitch and Youtube. To help enrich the streaming and chess world, we built some new tools to facilitate both streaming and watching streams. We're happy to announce the Lichess Streamer Community! Streamers get new tools to reach out to their viewers, and viewers will find it easier to discover interesting streamers.

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With a record-breaking 9036 participants in the recent winter marathon, chess players made a statement of support for endurance events. But do chess variant players feel the same way? There's only one way to find out!

We're hosting 24-hour tournaments for each chess variant, starting with Three Check on January 6. Each event will have a $100 prize pool ($50/$30/$20), generously donated by FischyVishy, aka Fischy, aka The Fish.

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We've grown a lot since our summer update! Read about some of the most prominent new features and changes below.

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118 titled players joined our inaugural Lichess Titled Arena tournament, which after 2 hours of intense competition, was won by none other than world champion Magnus Carlsen! Magnus chose to donate his prize of $500 back to Lichess, to increase the first prize of the next Title Arena. The remaining $1000 is donated by an anonymous chess philanthropist. A big thanks to both! Consequently, this tournament will have a first prize of $1000! The tournament will be streamed by ChessNetwork on his channel.

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Yesterday lichess hosted the strongest arena-style tournament in history and it was won by the strongest player alive. 118 titled players participated including 22 GMs. In the days leading up to the event lichess staff were mobbed with titled players excited to get their title verified so they could participate in the event. The prize fund was $1000 in total with $500 going to the winner, although it seems that this was secondary to most players who simply wanted the chance to play in a fantastically strong tournament. We chose a time control of 1 0 due to its popularity among elite online players and to show off the speed of lichess’ interface. Many of the participants chose to remain anonymous leading to rampant speculation before and during the event as to the identities of certain players, especially the ones who were thrashing GMs at an impressive rate!

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