03 January 2015

Lichess, Third Look

After Lichess, First Look and Lichess, Second Look, is there any more to say? Yes, there is. That 'First Look' post only introduced the site's chess960 play against an engine, while 'Second Look' was a review of all my links to online play sites.

The site appears to be managed from ornicar/lila · GitHub, which bills itself as 'Best chess web application, ever'. Wikipedia, on its GitHub page, tells us,

GitHub is a web-based Git repository hosting service, which offers all of the distributed revision control and source code management (SCM) functionality of Git as well as adding its own features. Unlike Git, which is strictly a command-line tool, GitHub provides a web-based graphical interface and desktop as well as mobile integration.

The ornicar/lila page adds,

It's a free online chess game focused on realtime and ease of use. It has a search engine, computer analysis, tournaments, forums, teams, puzzles, a weird monitoring console, and a world map. The UI is available in 80 languages thanks to the community.

Since my interest in the site is mainly for chess960, I searched both the web and the Lichess forum for material relevant to Fischer's greatest invention. One forum post from the past month, Forum > General Chess Discussion > Chess 960, asked, 'How popular is this variant here?', and led me to the site's search page.

There I learned that of the 50.000.000+ games recorded on the site, almost 600.000 are chess960. As a percentage that might seem small, but it's hardly discouraging; chess960 adoption is still in its very early days. I also learned that 32 games have been played where the average rating of the two players was more than 2400. That could be a good starting point for a future post on this blog.

Another starting point might be the on the site's GitHub page.

If you want to add a live chess section to your website, you are welcome to embed lichess. It's very easy. [...] Just embed lichess using an iframe.

I'm looking at those tabs at the top of every page on this blog -- 'Home' ... 'Chess960 1-2-3' -- and telling myself, 'Let's give it a try!'

1 comment:

18Chung said...

I just stumbled onto your blog site. My first impression: A lucky find for me.
- Now just a few concerning lichess:

1) A superficial look with their search function told me, that 960 is played at about 2% of all games. So! that means more than 1000 games per day actually played. A minute on average.

2)Beautifully clean interface - Bauhaus of online chess engines .

3)Excellent for its 'open concept'.

I could tell y'all more if you wish.