Lichess 2024 Half-Year Update

Your donations and support have allowed us to do many awesome things this half-year that we hope you will enjoy. We will continue to work hard to give you the best free, libre, and open-source chess experience, and that is only possible because of the chess community's trust in Lichess. We are excited to announce work on a lot of different areas of Lichess, so read on to see how we have changed for the better!

If you want to find out more about what we've done in the last six months, you can find our (rather lengthy!) changelog here.

Mobile App Beta Release

We had announced two years ago that we now have a full-time mobile app developer. We recently announced that the mobile app is now in public beta. You can now do many of the same activities you enjoy doing on the website, including playing real time or correspondence chess, solving chess puzzles from a wide variety of themes, racing against the clock in Puzzle Storm, analysing your games with Stockfish 16, or watching Lichess TV. The app is being continuously worked on, and we are appreciative of all the beta testers and contributors!

Play Store App Link

Improved Broadcasts

We have had broadcast improvements on our radar for a while now. Encouraged by community feedback and due to the closing down of Chess24’s broadcasts, we dedicated a lot of time to restructure broadcasts. You can see the work on the project management page here. Broadcast images were added, making the broadcast page much more visually appealing. Cloud eval boards on broadcast mini-boards and important team tournament improvements were also implemented. Now, streamers also appear on broadcasts with direct embedding, a feature which was worked on in record time for our Candidates coverage. You can also subscribe to events to receive notifications when they begin. Broadcasts continue to be actively worked on, and we hope that Lichess can make chess tournament coverage a pleasant experience for both the broadcasters and the users. You can read a more detailed list of changes from our blog post announcement.

New /fide Page for Players

A necessary supporting piece of the work on restructuring broadcasts was the development of a page which links all players in the FIDE database to the Lichess broadcasts of the tournaments they have played in. Now, you can quickly view the tournament history of a player (provided the event was broadcast on Lichess).

Events Coverage

With the new broadcasts in place, it seemed like an opportune time to cover one of the biggest events of the year — and, as it turned out, one of the most exciting — the 2024 Candidates held in Toronto, Canada. Lichess provided blog posts, streams (hosted by IM Irene Sukandar, with guest commentators GM Matthew Sadler, IM Laura Unuk and IM Eric Rosen), and annotated games for each round of the event. This coverage was only made possible by the tireless effort of volunteers who coordinated to make sure the entire event coverage package ran smoothly. We look forward to covering more events in future!

We also covered the Casablanca Chess tournament, which saw the participation of GMs Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura, Viswanathan Anand, and Bassem Amin, and the UzChess Cup, which saw GM Nodirbek Yakubboev winning on tiebreaks against GM Nodirbek Abdusattorov.

Road to Sharjah Collaboration

Lichess has become a hub for OTB tournament collaborations, and this year we added one of the strongest tournaments in the history of chess, the Sharjah Masters. Lichess would again like to congratulate our successful Lichess online qualifier IM Mahdi Gholami Orimi for achieving his final GM norm and a live rating of 2500! Of course, Lichess also covered this event.

FIDE World Corporate Online

The 2024 FIDE World Corporate Chess Championship was held in part on Lichess through online qualifiers and knockouts, which qualified the top 8 teams to a live finals event in New York. The pairings were done with some ingenuity by the Lichess developers, and we now have an efficient pairing system that can handle major online team-format tournaments.

Stockfish Improvements

Our open source friends at Stockfish helped reduce the neural network size for Stockfish 16.1, making local Stockfish 16 and server-side Stockfish 16.1 a possibility. Making use of Stockfish NNUEs greatly improves Stockfish's strength and helps Lichess users get full-strength Stockfish in just a few clicks.

Community News

We hosted an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit with the Lichess team, which you can view here. And our Director of Operations Theo Wait was interviewed by ChessBase India, available on YouTube.

Internal Improvements

We have previously outlined a plan of how we are going to take Lichess as a charity to the next level. This work is still ongoing, and we look forward to giving more detailed updates in the future. Lichess began very organically and grew (and still grows) because of its wonderful community. With increased size and complexity, governance is a key focus for Lichess.

Conclusion

We cannot reiterate enough that Lichess runs due to the generous contributions of the chess community and exists to serve the chess community. Your donations and support are invaluable. As we continue to develop, we are always listening to you on what we can do to improve this site and how to better serve the chess community.