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Chess.com vs. Lichess

siddhesh.substack.com

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Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#31

Post by imgabe »

I also recently switched to Lichess after using Chess.com for years. What tipped it for me was that I switched to an iPhone, and for some reason the Chess.com app on the iPhone absolutely obliterated my battery. I'm not sure what the issue was and maybe it's been fixed, but for a while it was just eating up battery life while playing like nothing else.

The servers for Lichess I find a little less reliable, but it's mostly fine. I also like the free-ness and ad-free business model of Lichess. I ended up donating $10. Overall Lichess is a better experience. Chess.com is perfectly usable without paying, but the constant nagging to sign up for a subscription is annoying.

Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#32

Post by thom »

dragontamer wrote: post #24
thom wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that’s all I meant, PEXT does the same job as magic bitboards where it’s available. But my point was that either way it’s run once (I seem to remember it’s even a constexpr in recent Stockfishes) so I’d be surprised if it were a major performance hit.

> But my point was that either way it’s run once Both Magic Bitboards and PEXT are run every single time Stockfish thinks of a Queen, Bishop, or Rook. Literally every, single, time. Stockfish does something like 10-million positions per second or something. That's a lot of times the "where can the Queen move" analysis is run. Speeding that routine up by 50% or something (PEXT vs Magic Bitboards) really does make a di…

Gotcha sorry, been a long time since I did this in chess and the last engine I wrote was for Hnefatafl where you’re using slightly bigger boards and I don’t remember there being a PEXT equivalent for bigger SSE stuff. Somehow convinced myself the lookup table generation was the only hard bit.

Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#33

Post by georgeoliver »

I've played on both (currently on Lichess). Few other distinguishing features:

* Chess.com has many excellent user blogs if you're into analysis and chess history.

* As a commercial platform, Chess.com can do a lot more to support professional players (Pro Chess League, etc.).

* The Lichess studies feature is really good and I don't think there's a comparable feature on Chess.com?

Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#34

Post by tehnub »

Multiple premoves is not really a pro for chess.com. Premoves function differently on the two websites. On chess.com, each premove takes 0.1 seconds from your clock when it executes, while on Lichess, they do not take any time at all. Given that difference, having multiple premoves would be too strong. Given the way premoves behave differently, I wouldn't say either one is superior to the other.

Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#35

Post by giords »

samdg wrote: post #16

A feature I was surprised not to see in the "Cleaner page UI during chess games" section: Lichess has a zen mode that maximally simplifies the UI. It removes the chat, navigation menu, move history notation. You're left with the board, clocks, resign/draw/takeback actions, and move replay. You can activate it by pressing "Z" during a game, and there's a menu option too.

You can even hide player ratings site-wide, to fully focus only on chess.

Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#36

Post by dragontamer »

thom wrote: post #32
dragontamer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But my point was that either way it’s run once Both Magic Bitboards and PEXT are run every single time Stockfish thinks of a Queen, Bishop, or Rook. Literally every, single, time. Stockfish does something like 10-million positions per second or something. That's a lot of times the "where can the Queen move" analysis is run. Speeding that routine up by 50% or something (PEXT vs Magic Bitboards) really does make a di…

Gotcha sorry, been a long time since I did this in chess and the last engine I wrote was for Hnefatafl where you’re using slightly bigger boards and I don’t remember there being a PEXT equivalent for bigger SSE stuff. Somehow convinced myself the lookup table generation was the only hard bit.

Yeah, PEXT only works on 64-bit numbers (and therefore, the 8x8 chess board / 64-bit "bitboard", with 1-bit per position).

EDIT: Both PEXT and Magic Bitboards have a "Setup" phase that is run once. But there's also a separate phase that is run on every single position in the actual chess-board part.

Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#37

Post by mellosouls »

I prefer Lichess simply because it handles connections far better than Chess.com which has a long-standing history of dropping them mid-game and denying its a problem at their end.

Other than that, I find Chess.com's interface more polished, but Lichess ultimately more personal, I guess as it is less corporate.

Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#38

Post by jfkw »

Glad to see Lichess mentioned here. I have been trying without success to log in or password reset using a Gmail account. Messages from Lichess never seem to be delivered to Gmail, even to the Spam folder. Short of creating a throwaway account to access the forums, is there any alternate way to contact Lichess admins to ask if this is a known issue?

Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#39

Post by dvirsky »

willbw wrote: post #6

It seems pointless to discuss chess.com without mentioning the paid features like game analysis which are much more user-friendly than Lichess.

For one thing, framing your accuracy in percentage instead of the obscure "centipawn loss" makes understanding how well you played much easier. BTW I've compared their analysis on a number of games, and it seemed like lichess is much tougher on you in what it defines as a blunder.

Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#40

Post by iza »

hooande wrote: post #13

which of these sites do people find is better for analyzing games? I have trouble remembering what I learn from looking at one game at a time

Lichess analysis is free and uses a much newer version of Stockfish, though some people prefer Chess.com's UI.
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