The first 2 rounds of Norway Chess have been full of interesting games and exciting moments.
It has been a very exciting beginning of this historical tournament. Most of the draws have been full of action, and we've had one decisive game per round so far, placing Hikaru Nakamura and Vladimir Kramnik at shared first place. Let's have a look at the action in round 1 and 2!
It has been a great first day for the Norway Chess tournament. Lichess is present in Stavanger to get every second of the action!
The strongest tournament in the history of chess started yesterday evening with the opening press conference and the blitz tournament. It is a fairly important phase because the winner of the blitz tournament gets to pick their start number in the main tournament and the top five will get the advantage of playing five white games. As we all know, playing an extra white game could be game changer with such a strong and close line-up.
What exactly has the chess community been up to?
lichess gets better every day with new features and improvements. Did you spot these?
Pushing the limits of Internet chess
There is not enough chess in the world! Let's fix that.
How about a 24 hours long tournament. Full earth rotation around its own axis. How about making it world wide. What if it was entirely free. Anyone could join. Thousands of chess enthusiasts competing for the first place, for the podium, for the top 10, for the top hundred, or just for seeing how high they can climb up the leaderboard.
Storing precise move times: science to the rescue
Thanks to the hard work of isaacly and revoof, lichess now stores precise move times, and can accurately replay the game clocks during analysis.
Lichess clocks always had a high precision of one hundredth of a second, while the game is playing. This has not changed. However, after the game has ended, we now store the historical move times (how long it took to play each move of the game) with high precision. This has several benefits.
Community powered analysis for your games
[EDIT 21th April 2017] Now with support for all variants!
All the chess without the pesky time (April Fools)
In recent years it has become popular among chess servers to offer chess with lower and lower time controls. It is with great pride that I announce that lichess has once and forever won this race by implementing a time control that is literally impossible to undercut. “Instant Chess” or chess played with a time control of 0+0 is now here on lichess.org!
Some may wonder how this is possible? Won’t players just flag and lose the game after 1 move? Not at all! On lichess premoves are registered as taking 0 seconds so if a player is fast enough with their mouse or good enough at anticipating their opponent's moves it is possible to play surprisingly long games.
Follow the eight remaining players as they battle it out in a round-robin crazyhouse tournament to decide the 2017 World Champ.
The Crazyhouse World Championship has just reached its most exciting stage. An intensely competitive knockout tournament featuring most of the world's strongest crazyhouse players, starting two months ago with qualifying rounds and progressing to the current stage with the recent conclusion of the Round of 16, has whittled the field down to the last eight players. These eight players— longtime legends of the bughouse and crazyhouse community to a man—will battle it out in the upcoming round-robin Candidates tournament for a $460 purse, a shiny new lichess profile trophy, and the prestige of being crowned the first Crazyhouse World Champion.
A new way to learn and improve your chess on Lichess
Today, we're excited to announce Practice, a way for users of all skill levels to learn and practice many different aspects of chess. Practice is based on the idea of playing against a chess engine in positions that are specifically designed to be instructive, allowing the user to learn about themes, recognize patterns and practice techniques. Currently, Practice covers piece checkmates, checkmate patterns, tactical themes and pawn endings.
The Lichess team recently met up to work and socialize in Paris. Here is the summary.
The second ever Lichess meetup and hackathon just concluded. Over the previous week, 11 lichess developers representing 8 different countries gathered in Paris to meet users, socialize and use the rare opportunity to work together in the same room to improve Lichess.
People came and went at different times, but on Friday night most of us got to meet (for the first time in many cases) and we had our first opportunity (of many) to eat and drink together.