PHOTO: FIDE/Timur Sattarov
Four players, two games, two draws, the first day of Women’s Candidate’s Pool B was concluded. The event is taking place from 29 November to 11 December, and the winner qualifies to the Candidates finals, facing Pool A winner, Lei Tingjie, for the right to participate in the Women’s World Championship Match against Wenjun Ju.
In July of 2021 we reported that legal proceedings had begun between the developers of Stockfish, the world’s strongest chess engine, and Chessbase GmbH, developers of various popular chess software. After more than a year of wrangling, that lawsuit has now come to an end with the parties agreeing to a settlement.
And why Sergei Zhigalko's epic near-comeback might have been the story of the tournament
The anonymous Grandmaster "Kontrajako" edged out mutdpro (GM Minh Le Tuan) in last Saturday's Titled Arena with MatthewG-p4p (IM Matvey Galchenko) coming in third (an auspicious result for the young Russian International Master). The top two places were decided in the final minute when kontraJako prevailed against MahammadMuradli2003 whilst mutdpro lost to fourth-place finisher Zhigalko_Sergei.
In some our recent updates, we shared Lichess' future plans. With an eye on our future, we have exciting news!
Because of our community's generosity, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve hired a full-time mobile developer to work on the Lichess mobile applications available on iOS and Android, starting from 1 November 2022.
The number of users who access Lichess via the mobile app has only increased year on year for several years, and we expect this number to continue growing.
Our current setup and our future plans
Last month, we published a blog about Lichess’s charity nonprofit status. In this post, we want to dive deeper into Lichess’s history, how we’re currently set up, and our plans for the future. Between 2010 and 2016, virtually all of Lichess’s costs were covered by Lichess’s founder and main developer Thibault Duplessis. Lichess at the time was an association de fait, a basic association type that doesn’t require a formal legal structure. However, even as early as 2015 it was obvious that this wasn't sustainable, as by that point the site’s monthly operating costs had grown to thousands of dollars per month.
Dozens of followers distraught
In a month full of surprises and controversy in the world of chess, yet another bombshell failed to occur when National Master John Chernoff (ZugAddict on lichess.org) was at no point a significant factor in yesterday's Titled Arena, finishing 141st out of 366 participants. When asked by absolutely no one to explain his unremarkable performance, Mr. Chernoff mumbled something about his mouse and bullet chess being an undignified activity to base a serious chess tournament on and left to turn on the bathtub faucet for his cat, "Bear".
306,296 games. 20,171,017 moves. 73,000+ entries to the Lichess qualifiers. Two winners — GM Hikaru Nakamura and GM Nodirbek Abdusattorov.
Both Hikaru Nakamura and Nodirbek Abdusattorov were players awarded wildcards from co-organisers; Nakamura’s from the Charlotte Chess Center and North American Corporate Chess League and Abdusattorov’s wildcard was from Offerspill Sjakklubb.
Try our custom puzzle set made from the later games of the tournament: https://lichess.org/study/XGCz40gk
A treatise on "business models"
We’ve spoken before about Lichess’s ethical stance and how we do “business”. Indeed, at the bottom of this and every other of our blog posts there is a short explanation:
Lichess is a charity and entirely free/libre open source software. All operating costs, development, and content are funded solely by user donations.
With the open and invitational arena stage over, we now move to the first Swiss stages marking the midpoint of the qualifiers on Lichess. At the Swiss stages, eligible players can only take part in the groups they’ve been sorted into. Eligible players and the groups they’ve been sorted into can be found here. All the Swiss groups of the FIDE Offerspill World Fischer Random Championship Qualifiers begin at 1400 UTC on 10th September. All the Swiss groups of the FIDE CCC and NACCL World Fischer Random Championship Qualifiers begin at 1700 UTC on 10th September. The top 18 players of each group go through, where they will meet on 11th September (with the same start times), and be met by 10 wildcards. In total, up to 100 players will compete in the second Swiss stage to determine the final 16 who go through to the KO stages. Starting from the second Swiss stage, players who are asked will be required to join an online call 30 minutes before the round starts, with arbiters present to conduct relevant checks. Failure to join the call or comply with arbiters instructions may result in a player’s withdrawal from the tournament. More information will be sent directly to players; therefore players should carefully check their Lichess inboxes and notifications. Wildcards of the second Swiss stage are as follows, to date:
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 (excluding 960 warm-up, where the minimum rated games are 10).