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Chess.com vs. Lichess

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Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#191

Post by Assiosss »

chollida1 wrote: post #80
tholman wrote: post #43

If you've been following these two products for the last few years it's definitely clear to see that Lichess is slowly eating chess.com's lunch ... They're not fast at development, but slowly and surely improving and innovating on the space via being open source. For example, Lichess puzzles aren't quite of the same quality yet and their puzzle games are new (BUT) they've built and are improving the tech to create ne…

Interesting perspective. I have subscriptions to both and my first reaction was the exact opposite of yours. Chess.con is so far ahead of lichens that it wasn’t debatable. What in your opinion leads you to believe that lichess is eating chess.com’s lunch. For me games are far easier and quicker to setup with chess.com. The drills are better at chess.com and so are the lessons, both in-depth and breadth. I can’t reall…

Your rating being higher on Lichess doesn't mean that the competition is better, Lichess ratings just start higher, see https://lichess.org/page/rating-systems

On the contrary, there are more Grandmasters playing on Lichess (like the World Champion), and if you check your percentile on both sites, you'll most likely see that you're better than a higher percentage of chesscom users than Lichess - which would indicate that Lichess players are better on average.

And yes, I also think Lichess is superior to chesscom i nearly every way.

Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#192

Post by elliekelly »

lelanthran wrote: post #181
blub wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tournament UI has been broken on iOS for years. It doesn't register taps properly and some UI elements are not shown where they should be. OTOH, the website works pretty well on mobile, scrolling aside. In general, I also had the feeling that the lichess UI is a bit more immediate, it was easier for me to get around. But I think a big difference is not in features or UX, but the behaviour of the players. Because…

> severe lack of gentlemanly behaviour. As an example, I don't think I've ever seen someone concede a game, it's almost always a bitter fight way past the point a reasonable player may accept defeat. I almost never concede at my (low) level: at my level it's very possible that someone lets me go into a stalemate which is preferable to a loss.

I’m also a low level player but I fundamentally don’t understand the chess culture of “gentlemanly” concession. It’s a game you’re playing to win and even at the highest levels players can and do make mistakes. It’s not over until it’s over. When you compete you play through the whistle. You run past the finish line. You keep throwing towards the endzone even when it’s 28-3 and things are looking pretty bleak.

Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#193

Post by moffkalast »

jeremyjh wrote: post #187
moffkalast wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chess.com does benefit from their collection of training bots with different strategies and more forgiving play style which are pretty neat to play against. Though most of them are behind a paywall so eh. Lichess only offers stockfish levels when it comes to bots, and even the lowest level seems more brutal than bots with x2 its ELO on chess.com.

Stockfish level 1 can be beaten by a novice playing their 4th or 5th game ever. Also on Lichess there are other bots you can play against, for example the maia series which is an LC0 bot with a neural network trained on Lichess games of a particular rating level. Maia feels much more like a real person than any bot based on stockfish. https://lichess.org/blog/X9PUixUAANCqFRSh/introducing-maia-a...

Hmm I see, so there are other bots on lichess but they're set up as real players with a bot tag and you play them by challenging them directly. That seems like terrible UX when there's a whole separate menu to set up pve games and no way for a newcomer to learn that...

Sure stockfish level 1 is very beatable, but I do sometimes like sealclubbing super low rated bots so I don't have to think at all when playing and still win, for which the chess.com bots are very neat :P

Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#194

Post by anikan_vader »

mrpotato wrote: post #185
anikan_vader wrote: post #81

It's worth noting many of these points are subjective, and I disagree with all of the bullets in favor of chess.com. I'm 2100 Elo on Lichess for what it's worth. 1. I prefer the way Lichess handles right clicks, knight movement tracking, and tracking arrows. 2. 4-player chess: The author mentions that it's their favorite variant to watch. I can't say I've heard that opinion before. Personally I tend to stick to vanil…

> This is simply because chess.com pays streamers with the money they receive from premium users, whereas Lichess is free. Not only that but they also hold tournaments (ie: PogChamps which was a great success IMO) and they also have tournament analyses (ie: 2021 World Championship). They even have good production value! (outside of covid related limitations). That being said, I agree with your diss of chess.com and w…

Good point. While I never use chess.com, I did find their commentary on the recent championship with Fabi to be pretty amazing.

On the other hand, all of the money they spend on content like that is super effective marketing. It's a lot like how Coke will sponsor sports matches. Still, feelings of good will are feelings of good will.

Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#195

Post by elliekelly »

Freeboots wrote: post #57
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.

Oh my god you can turn it on during a game? Here I am turning it back on via the menu after saying GG each game! What a chum!

Same here! I can’t believe there’s a hot key for this! They really do think of everything.

Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#196

Post by jeremyjh »

moffkalast wrote: post #193
jeremyjh wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stockfish level 1 can be beaten by a novice playing their 4th or 5th game ever. Also on Lichess there are other bots you can play against, for example the maia series which is an LC0 bot with a neural network trained on Lichess games of a particular rating level. Maia feels much more like a real person than any bot based on stockfish. https://lichess.org/blog/X9PUixUAANCqFRSh/introducing-maia-a...

Hmm I see, so there are other bots on lichess but they're set up as real players with a bot tag and you play them by challenging them directly. That seems like terrible UX when there's a whole separate menu to set up pve games and no way for a newcomer to learn that... Sure stockfish level 1 is very beatable, but I do sometimes like sealclubbing super low rated bots so I don't have to think at all when playing and st…

Yes I agree it would be better and more discoverable if you had a list you could select from when you click the "Play With Computer" button. Maybe part of the reason that they don't is I don't think Lichess themselves actually host any of those bots, there are other people doing that who register it as a bot and it uses the Lichess API.

Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#197

Post by ylyn »

Closi wrote: post #134
ycombinete wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have subscriptions to both I'm not sure how you have a subscription to Lichess when it's a free site. Do you donate? > My Elo rank on lichess is a full 500 points higher on lichess than chess.com The ratings difference on lichess is arbitrary. Everyone starts higher (1500 vs 1200), so the average is higher. > For me games are far easier and quicker to setup with chess.com Unless I've missed something on chess.com…

> I'm not sure how you have a subscription to Lichess when it's a free site A subscription can just be an account - it doesn’t necessarily have to be a paid subscription.

No, then you would just say you have an account.

If you subscribe to a YT channel, you would just say you subscribe to the channel or you are a subscriber. You wouldn't say you have a "subscription" with the channel. That makes no sense.

Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#198

Post by anthk »

GhettoComputers wrote: post #96
xiaodai wrote: post #52

It's amazing to me that an open source product can be better than a paid product. I think OGS is quite good vs fox except that fox has alot more players in the go world

Linux servers are everywhere, MS uses linux, linux users are common on here, wikipedia killed Encarta. Don't be amazed, its the norm.

On chess: XBoard+gnuchess/stockfish, SCIM... free software won in a lot of places.

Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#199

Post by frogpelt »

toolslive wrote: post #144
frogpelt wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind sharing your rating on each? I've found 600-level games on Chess.com much harder to win than 1000-level games on Lichess.

who cares about absolute rating? no matter what the rating of your opponent is, it's all about the _difference_ between theirs and yours. It would have been nice to just have 1 number and one unit but it isn't. Now you have x on Fide, y on lichess, z on USCF, t on chess.com and w on fics. (for me it's 2000 Fide, 2300 Lichess, no USCF, no chess.com and 1850 on fics )

Well, actually I've even found 600-level games on Chess.com to be harder than 900-level games.

Obviously I've improved. But I wonder if the many of the very low ratings on Chess.com are just due to people making terrible blunders in otherwise pretty solid games.

Re: Chess.com vs. Lichess

#200

Post by Karolis_K »

For most of course it's not important, but Lichess has "blind mode" - this enables blind people to play chess online. Implementing this feature of course wouldn't pay off for Chess.com.
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