It turns out that chess-playing programs have standardized upon UCI (Universal Chess Interface), meaning any chess-playing program, (IE: Stockfish and Leela Chess) can interface with any UCI program (in this case, SCID vs PC).
SCID vs PC can then be tuned to whatever you think is appropriate for review. Add the tablebases if you want perfect endgame analysis, or favor faster reviews with less analysis (if you're going for speed). Or you can run analysis overnight, if you want the computer to spend 20+ minutes per position.
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With an actual analysis program like SCID vs PC, you can try variations and deeper studies than what either chess.com or lichess.org can offer. There's no replacement to just running these calculations on your own very capable computers... rather than leveraging the limited compute abilities of a shared server with a thousand players on it. (Or in the case of lichess, I think its a Javascript program instead of a proper x86-assembly tuned high-speed analysis bot).
Stockfish in particular has a nifty quirk: most of its analysis is done in a giant hash table of positions. Meaning variations / transpositions are very quick for Stockfish to analyze (or more like, Stockfish probably has a variation already partially-analyzed before you even decided to think about it yourself. The hash table stores this partial analysis, and allows Stockfish to have a leg-up on analyzing the position when you decide upon exploring that variation).
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The equivalent for Go is Lizzie, which is easier since Lizzie comes with LeelaZero and KataGo already. (KataGo is the superior analysis engine IMO. Both are superhuman, but KataGo's score-based analysis is more useful for finding endgame mistakes).
Lichess uses Stockfish 14+ NNUE compiled with WASM, so it should be essentially as fast as running it locally on your own machine. They don't expose as many of the tuning options, but that's not an enormous difference for most people.
So no, it is just just some Javascript program.
And as far as I know, essentially every modern chess engine uses a hashtable of positions such that transpositions are essentially free. This isn't a unique "quirk" of Stockfish.
Except Stockfish has some hand-written x86-specific bits, such as PEXT / PDEP, or BMI2 instructions. I'm talking hand-tuned assembly here, really good stuff and very high performance.
Running Stockfish 30% to 40% slower for no reason at all, and with far less RAM / resources means that you'll get weaker analysis at slower speeds.
And those "tuning options" include tablebases, which would provably play perfectly (and Stockfish is smart enough to "think" with tablebases: if it can prove a won position with a tablebase, it won't bother exploring and will just report the mate-in-300 immediately)
PEXT is mostly for magic bitboards, right? So it’s more of a one time cost. But still, I’d be amazed if it weren’t much slower in the browser now and forever.
No. Magic Bitboards are what you use if you don't have PEXT available. EDIT: I expect the WASM version to use magic-bitboards (which is just a "magical" multiply instruction + a lookup).
Every single sliding piece (ie: Rooks, Bishops, and Queens) use PEXT (or magic-bitboards if the PEXT code is unavailable) to determine where to go. Its a fundamental calculation to determine very, very quickly which moves are legal or not.
Both PEXT and Magic Bitboards are incredible techniques for solving the sliding-piece question. However, PEXT is much much much faster, but relies upon an obscure x86-only assembly instruction (that is slower on AMD Zen or Zen2 unfortunately. So you still need to know your hardware details, Intel machines should use the PEXT version).
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Still, even AMD users want the BMI2 version, which has a bunch of bit-operations that can be optimized that are used all the time. (And besides, AMD Zen3 is actually faster on PEXT now, so PEXT is looking good for the future)
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In either case, I have my doubts that the NNUE neural-net runs anywhere near as good on WASM than on the hand-optimized SIMD / AVX kernels that the Stockfish team wrote.
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.
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 difference in the great scheme of speed.
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Unless you're playing some fantasy-version of Chess (or maybe some extreme endgame where all pawns, queens, bishops, and rooks are dead... pawns because they might promote into a queen/bishop/rook), you'll be benefiting from selecting that PEXT version if you're on an Intel or Zen3 processor.
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.
Variable-shift perfect hashing (fancy magic) is not especially slower than using pext/pdep, and in any case, there is little value in making move generation more performant. A decent move generator using perfect hashing can run at 40 mnode/s, but Stockfish runs at about 1 mnode/s with a single thread (because of the other work it does). A quick application of Amdahl's law shows that the performance gain from speeding up move generation by any amount is negligible. In fact, with a transposition table and staged move generation, for many nodes only a fraction of possible moves are generated.
Is the performance difference of PEXT vs. the classic 64-bit magic bitboards actually close to 50%? The very slight latency increase of and/multiply/shift instead of pext should be somewhat offset by somewhat smaller tables (since magic hashing can have helpful collisions), right?
I should probably know this, since I "discovered" PEXT bitboards, but I got out of computer chess before I got BMI-capable hardware, and so I never actually implemented them :)
> Running Stockfish 30% to 40% slower for no reason at all, and with far less RAM / resources means that you'll get weaker analysis at slower speeds.
Even if 100% true, this is a complete non-issue. Absolutely nobody reading this comment is going to notice a meaningful difference or benefit from running their games against a 3550 Elo engine running hand-optimized x86 instructions versus a 3200 Elo engine running in WASM in the browser.
The extreme convenience of pressing one button to receive high-quality analysis (and ongoing live analysis powered by a WASM engine) beats the annoyance of exporting your games to PGN and importing them into an external UI just for the sake of analyzing your games even farther past the horizon that humans will ever truly be able to understand. If you're a competitive GM or Super GM? Sure, maybe that level of analysis will help you find unexplored lines for your preparation. Fro anyone else? It's completely irrelevant.
> The extreme convenience of pressing one button to receive high-quality analysis (and ongoing live analysis powered by a WASM engine) beats the annoyance of exporting your games to PGN and importing them into an external UI just for the sake of analyzing your games even farther past the horizon that humans will ever truly be able to understand. If you're a competitive GM or Super GM? Sure, maybe that level of analysis will help you find unexplored lines for your preparation. Fro anyone else? It's completely irrelevant.
Its one button click for me.
"Download .PGN" button -> open with SCID vs PC (which I setup as the default app for PGNs).
I hit "F2" and bam, analysis is going on already. Sure, you have to set it up so that the F2 engine is Stockfish / tuned parameters as appropriate, but in the long run, having control of this is clearly beneficial. Especially if you're going to be using computer analysis to teach yourself more advanced tactics.
What do you use for a database? I seem to remember the person behind Caissabase inhabits these parts but that hasn’t been updated in a while. I have ChessBase but find myself in Linux most of the time and haven’t copied the database over because ChessBase’s UI causes me great pain.
It was last updated on 5th December 2021, next release will be 1st Jan 2022 (since World Rapid/Blitz championship is on-going and I want to roll that into it).
Lichess has a 'fishnet' of donated servers [0] that allow you to analyse using Stockfish on proper hardware. You can have up to 20 deep analyses a day.
The web client uses Stockfish compiled to WASM which is decently fast.
There’s also chessx[1], which is what I’ve found myself to prefer (I’ve also never gotten SCID vs PC to run on macOS, unfortunately). It has some oddities, but once you get past that there’s a lot of great functionality to enjoy.
Decent analysis and I agree with all the points. I think if chess.com didn't have the streamer network behind it and Gotham/Hikaru etc moved to lichess that people would entirely forget about chess.com.
This is one area where I think the cosmetics for purchase model makes sense. It could be seen as a way to support a creator in a built in way as part of an app. For many free projects it can be easy to overlook the fact that someone has poured their time and effort into it to make it happen, especially if they don't have "ads" that are asking directly for donations.
Lichess does this as well, and it's completely free. It's the "Learn From Your Mistakes" button visible after you've performed computer analysis of your game.
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.
I disagree, ACPL is a well defined system, while nobody really knows what the accuracy means or how it's defined.
1 CPL, in short, is the loss of 1/100th of a pawn. Take the average of that and you get ACPL. So a ACPL of 100 means that you on average lost one pawn on every move (of course this isn't literal) that you played.
Interesting, I find the exact opposite. Measuring things in terms of pawns give me a feel of how far behind I was from optimal play, whereas with the percentage, it's quite abstract. What does 70% accuracy mean?
100% is only best moves (my record is 99.8%), anything above 90 is awesome, etc. I'm not sure what 15 ACPL means, but if you tell me 95% perfect it's more intuitive to me personally. But it might be because I'm not a very good and sophisticated player...
I think the percentage give you a sense of familiarity. You're used to be graded 0-100 in exams and such. However, that grade is actually not that useful or intuitive as you may think, since you don't know how your game is scored. You don't understand the metric. For instance, it could mean the number of moves you got perfectly divided by the total number of moves in the game. It could be the number of moves you lost at most 30 centipawns by the number of moves. It can mean anything, the point is just that it's a black box and no one truly understands that metric outside of chess.com. Whereas average centipawn loss is a tried metric which everyone uses, except for chess.com.
I spent a lot of time on chess.com (including paying for membership) but recently switched to lichess, because simply it feels a better, more polished, product. Love the fact it does not have ads (https://lichess.org/blog/YF-ZORQAACAA89PI/why-lichess-will-a.... ) unlike chess.com which is ad-infested.
Lichess is very customizable. Love the everyday tournaments and the community there as well. Would pay for it.
The in-game analysis in lichess is fantastic (too bad my favorite WebKit browser doesn't support WASM SIMD, looking at you Bug #222382 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=222382 ) so I don't get the full Stockfish NNUE. That is the only thing I miss really.
I have been teaching my daughter too. She is younger (she just turned 5), and En passant is one of the rules I voluntarily skipped (together with Castling). Pawns rules are already such a mess without it!
Lichess has a monthly subscription you can get for $5 or a custom amount. Does nothing except except make your badge a different color. Totally worth it to support such a great site.
Lichess is so much better. It's free. chess.com thinks its facebook and it looks really childish (they probably copied things from chesskid). They have like a billion developers (why? its chess.. and already done). Lichess is like 1 guy (who I think used to work for chesscom until the ceo was a dick or something)
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.
It doesn't crash; it's sluggish. It's hard to quantify but it's like there is a quasi animation effect that you can't turn off. In something like 3|2 it's not terrible but in 1 minute games its a real issue.
I thought for a while that maybe I was just used to the lichess interface but I don't have the same sluggish feel when playing on my phone on the website vs the app.
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.
You can premove as many moves as you want in a lichess correspondence game. I feel like you can even premove to whatever depth you want, but it has been a while since I've played.
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.
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?
I requested this a few months ago as my server was sitting unused and I wanted to help. Never got an answer back, maybe because the server's specs aren't great. Either way now I've got nextcloud running so unfortunately too late :(
You probably had the "laptop mode" toggled on in the setup. With it on you will rarely get games to analyse. This will only send you games when the network is stressed. If you toggle it off you should get one game after another almost constantly.
I doubt it's speed. I was getting constant games with an i3-5100.
Neat. Is this vulnerable to abuse by submitting bad results back to the server, or have they figured out a low-cost way of verifying the integrity of the results somehow?
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 new puzzles from games played on their system which is ever increasing, with the benefit of being REAL positions reached in games.
It feels like when Lichess make a move (eg into puzzle games) its sudden and of high quality. ++ Their growth is amazing especially considering they aren't paying chess influencers to use their platform.
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 really think of a single thing lichess does better so I find it strange that you see things So vastly different.
Also the competition on chess.con seems far better. My Elo rank on lichess is a full 500 points higher on lichess than chess.com, so I guess some purple could consider the go cost to be a point for lichess
What do you see in lichess that i superior to chess.com?
How exactly increased elo makes lichess worse? I would only argue that because of the number of players chess.com it seems more stable. I really feel every 50 of elo difference.
Does chess.com have studies? They've completely changed how I work on openings. It's so easy to start a new study on some line, collect a few interesting games in it, add my own, and then analyze them with Stockfish right there for when I'm interested in it's opinion.
A great Lichess feature is that you can turn off ratings completely in settings, for the whole site. They're still used for matchmaking but kept completely hidden. Far better experience.
I think this is called “Zen mode” for those trying to find it.
I’ve had it active and it’s a good psychological edge. You should always just play the pieces coming at you and not think, "wow, this person’s 250 points better than me, I should expect to lose and play for a draw", but by hiding ratings you don’t introduce any chance to think like that.
Site Settings only appears on the website, for Lichess app users like me who couldn't find it. But once you change the setting there it will apply in the mobile app if you're logged in.
I like this setting, but it makes the home page look barren to me. It totally removes the central block showing the leaderboard and tournament winners, becuase they contain ratings.
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.
I don't see anything that chess.com does better than Lichess except for having more players on the site. Aside from time to start game, which is usually a difference of only a couple seconds unless at high Elo, Lichess is equally good or better in all aspects. I'm not saying Lichess has better puzzles or other such things, but it is 100% equally good, while being free.
It has been a few years since I looked at any of the major chess sites, but it used to be that chess.com had way more teaching and training material than lichess.
Where do they stand nowadays in that regard?
I also see that ChessCube.com is gone. Too bad. They had an interesting tournament format whose name I forget that was wild and fun. Instead of having a fixed number of games like normal tournaments, these ran for a fixed time. As soon as you finished a game you could go back into the pool to be paired for another game. So someone who is fast and good had a better chance of winning the tournament than someone who is good but not as fast, because they could play more games.
Lichess has some good lessons especially for beginners but they don't have audio like chess.com's. I think they are good though and what is neat about them is they are based on the studies feature, so anyone can create an interactive lesson on Lichess and share them. When my kids got interested in chess I created Lichess accounts for them.
Some of chess.com's content helped me when I first started playing again, but I later found other free stuff that's just as good. It is nice to have it all in one place but I cancelled my membership when I found out I only got 25 puzzles a day with my "gold" membership. That is just lame.
One thing not mentioned here is the players. Chess.com is much more beginner heavy. I'm a pretty bad player, and while on lichess I'm slightly below the median, on chess.com I'm around 80th percentile. It also feels like the common or average playing style is a bit different, more basic and aggressive on chess.com. Here we go, another Fried Liver!
The Elo distribution is really different between them. I'm hovering around 1500 on lichess Blitz and 1100 on chess.com Blitz. I would say 1000 on lichess ~= 500-600 on chess.com.
Chess.com and lichess use different rating systems, and give different ratings to new players. Chess.com ratings end up being consistently lower, but that doesn't correspond to you being in a lower percentile of players on chess.com (what parent was talking about).
For reference though, I'm 2000 lichess rapid, and 1700 chess.com rapid. I use chess.com as my "I'm not going to play well right now" site so it's a bit worse because of that, but mostly it's because of the difference in rating system/pool.
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.
I've also noticed that there isn't a lot of difference. You get horrible blunders from higher rated players and lower rated players will kick your ass. I can drop or rise 200 Elo points in a couple of hours easily.
A smidge off topic, but I'm curious; is there a place where you can upload (say) a chess bot you designed and play against other uploaded chess bots? (or any move base game, even as simple as 'paper rock scissors')?
Lichess allows you to upload a custom bots and play them (and other can too), and I believe you can also run against other bots. There's also https://www.chess.com/computer-chess-championship, but IDK how one enters.
You can also use the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS) as a test bed for chess engines. The interface is telnet-based, so it's pretty easy to experiment with and learn. There's also "zippy" mode in xboard that allows you to connect your engine to FICS .
The commands below will login as a guest and display all of the computer accounts. Use the finger command to find info about an account.
telnet freechess.org
g <ENTER>
who C<ENTER>
finger ACCOUNT
Sadly, FICS has been dying a slow death for the past 10 years ... but there are plenty of idle CPU accounts waiting for an opponent.
chess.com has always been more laggy when moving pieces around than lichess, which is perfectly lag free animation for me. Not sure what is causing it, but I have the feeling, that it affects my blitz performance a lot, especially in time trouble.
I wonder how much general agreement there is with these opinions. Personally I agreed with most of the UI opinions except the preference for L-shaped knight move arrows.
216 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] threadIt turns out that chess-playing programs have standardized upon UCI (Universal Chess Interface), meaning any chess-playing program, (IE: Stockfish and Leela Chess) can interface with any UCI program (in this case, SCID vs PC).
SCID vs PC can then be tuned to whatever you think is appropriate for review. Add the tablebases if you want perfect endgame analysis, or favor faster reviews with less analysis (if you're going for speed). Or you can run analysis overnight, if you want the computer to spend 20+ minutes per position.
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With an actual analysis program like SCID vs PC, you can try variations and deeper studies than what either chess.com or lichess.org can offer. There's no replacement to just running these calculations on your own very capable computers... rather than leveraging the limited compute abilities of a shared server with a thousand players on it. (Or in the case of lichess, I think its a Javascript program instead of a proper x86-assembly tuned high-speed analysis bot).
Stockfish in particular has a nifty quirk: most of its analysis is done in a giant hash table of positions. Meaning variations / transpositions are very quick for Stockfish to analyze (or more like, Stockfish probably has a variation already partially-analyzed before you even decided to think about it yourself. The hash table stores this partial analysis, and allows Stockfish to have a leg-up on analyzing the position when you decide upon exploring that variation).
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The equivalent for Go is Lizzie, which is easier since Lizzie comes with LeelaZero and KataGo already. (KataGo is the superior analysis engine IMO. Both are superhuman, but KataGo's score-based analysis is more useful for finding endgame mistakes).
So no, it is just just some Javascript program.
And as far as I know, essentially every modern chess engine uses a hashtable of positions such that transpositions are essentially free. This isn't a unique "quirk" of Stockfish.
Running Stockfish 30% to 40% slower for no reason at all, and with far less RAM / resources means that you'll get weaker analysis at slower speeds.
And those "tuning options" include tablebases, which would provably play perfectly (and Stockfish is smart enough to "think" with tablebases: if it can prove a won position with a tablebase, it won't bother exploring and will just report the mate-in-300 immediately)
Every single sliding piece (ie: Rooks, Bishops, and Queens) use PEXT (or magic-bitboards if the PEXT code is unavailable) to determine where to go. Its a fundamental calculation to determine very, very quickly which moves are legal or not.
Both PEXT and Magic Bitboards are incredible techniques for solving the sliding-piece question. However, PEXT is much much much faster, but relies upon an obscure x86-only assembly instruction (that is slower on AMD Zen or Zen2 unfortunately. So you still need to know your hardware details, Intel machines should use the PEXT version).
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Still, even AMD users want the BMI2 version, which has a bunch of bit-operations that can be optimized that are used all the time. (And besides, AMD Zen3 is actually faster on PEXT now, so PEXT is looking good for the future)
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In either case, I have my doubts that the NNUE neural-net runs anywhere near as good on WASM than on the hand-optimized SIMD / AVX kernels that the Stockfish team wrote.
Even if there's some auto-vectorization that WASM can do, its really hard to beat handcrafted assembly / intrinsics (https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/master/...)
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 difference in the great scheme of speed.
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Unless you're playing some fantasy-version of Chess (or maybe some extreme endgame where all pawns, queens, bishops, and rooks are dead... pawns because they might promote into a queen/bishop/rook), you'll be benefiting from selecting that PEXT version if you're on an Intel or Zen3 processor.
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.
I should probably know this, since I "discovered" PEXT bitboards, but I got out of computer chess before I got BMI-capable hardware, and so I never actually implemented them :)
Even if 100% true, this is a complete non-issue. Absolutely nobody reading this comment is going to notice a meaningful difference or benefit from running their games against a 3550 Elo engine running hand-optimized x86 instructions versus a 3200 Elo engine running in WASM in the browser.
The extreme convenience of pressing one button to receive high-quality analysis (and ongoing live analysis powered by a WASM engine) beats the annoyance of exporting your games to PGN and importing them into an external UI just for the sake of analyzing your games even farther past the horizon that humans will ever truly be able to understand. If you're a competitive GM or Super GM? Sure, maybe that level of analysis will help you find unexplored lines for your preparation. Fro anyone else? It's completely irrelevant.
Its one button click for me.
"Download .PGN" button -> open with SCID vs PC (which I setup as the default app for PGNs).
I hit "F2" and bam, analysis is going on already. Sure, you have to set it up so that the F2 engine is Stockfish / tuned parameters as appropriate, but in the long run, having control of this is clearly beneficial. Especially if you're going to be using computer analysis to teach yourself more advanced tactics.
Stockfish compiled to multithreaded WASM (on supporting browsers)
It was last updated on 5th December 2021, next release will be 1st Jan 2022 (since World Rapid/Blitz championship is on-going and I want to roll that into it).
The web client uses Stockfish compiled to WASM which is decently fast.
If you're not an IM/GM, it's "good enough"
[0] https://github.com/niklasf/fishnet
[1]: https://chessx.sourceforge.io
1 CPL, in short, is the loss of 1/100th of a pawn. Take the average of that and you get ACPL. So a ACPL of 100 means that you on average lost one pawn on every move (of course this isn't literal) that you played.
wow! is this realy true?!
https://github.com/ornicar/lila/graphs/contributors
https://www.twitch.tv/ornicar2
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.
Here I am turning it back on via the menu after saying GG each game! What a chum!
Lichess is very customizable. Love the everyday tournaments and the community there as well. Would pay for it.
The in-game analysis in lichess is fantastic (too bad my favorite WebKit browser doesn't support WASM SIMD, looking at you Bug #222382 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=222382 ) so I don't get the full Stockfish NNUE. That is the only thing I miss really.
lichess is not one guy either, there's a whole community of developers, moderators etc.
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.
Maybe try to reinstall your app if or crashes or won’t let you play because I’d definitely should.
I thought for a while that maybe I was just used to the lichess interface but I don't have the same sluggish feel when playing on my phone on the website vs the app.
* 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?
Other than that, I find Chess.com's interface more polished, but Lichess ultimately more personal, I guess as it is less corporate.
I doubt it's speed. I was getting constant games with an i3-5100.
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 new puzzles from games played on their system which is ever increasing, with the benefit of being REAL positions reached in games.
It feels like when Lichess make a move (eg into puzzle games) its sudden and of high quality. ++ Their growth is amazing especially considering they aren't paying chess influencers to use their platform.
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 really think of a single thing lichess does better so I find it strange that you see things So vastly different.
Also the competition on chess.con seems far better. My Elo rank on lichess is a full 500 points higher on lichess than chess.com, so I guess some purple could consider the go cost to be a point for lichess
What do you see in lichess that i superior to chess.com?
https://lichess.org/faq#ratings
I’ve had it active and it’s a good psychological edge. You should always just play the pieces coming at you and not think, "wow, this person’s 250 points better than me, I should expect to lose and play for a draw", but by hiding ratings you don’t introduce any chance to think like that.
What I mean is under "Preferences", "Site settings", "Show player ratings".
If it's "No", then no ratings are shown anywhere.
Site Settings only appears on the website, for Lichess app users like me who couldn't find it. But once you change the setting there it will apply in the mobile app if you're logged in.
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.
Where do they stand nowadays in that regard?
I also see that ChessCube.com is gone. Too bad. They had an interesting tournament format whose name I forget that was wild and fun. Instead of having a fixed number of games like normal tournaments, these ran for a fixed time. As soon as you finished a game you could go back into the pool to be paired for another game. So someone who is fast and good had a better chance of winning the tournament than someone who is good but not as fast, because they could play more games.
Some of chess.com's content helped me when I first started playing again, but I later found other free stuff that's just as good. It is nice to have it all in one place but I cancelled my membership when I found out I only got 25 puzzles a day with my "gold" membership. That is just lame.
I've found 600-level games on Chess.com much harder to win than 1000-level games on Lichess.
50th percentile lichess and 80th percentile chess.com
For reference though, I'm 2000 lichess rapid, and 1700 chess.com rapid. I use chess.com as my "I'm not going to play well right now" site so it's a bit worse because of that, but mostly it's because of the difference in rating system/pool.
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.
I think OGS is quite good vs fox except that fox has alot more players in the go world
I don't do it myself, but more info here: https://lichess.org/blog/WvDNticAAMu_mHKP/welcome-lichess-bo... And here: https://lichess.org/api#operation/botAccountUpgrade
The commands below will login as a guest and display all of the computer accounts. Use the finger command to find info about an account.
Sadly, FICS has been dying a slow death for the past 10 years ... but there are plenty of idle CPU accounts waiting for an opponent.