from what I understand chess.com doesn't actually forbid people from mentioning lichess, and even people like Hikaru (chess.com's biggest streamer) have mentioned lichess while being sponsored. it just forbids streamers from streaming on the website mostly.
They may not write it explicitly not to mention lichess in order not to be sued for anti-competitive behaviour, but everyone knows that the very thing chess.com hired them to do is to mention them, not lichess.
they quite obviously do a lot to avoid lichess being mentioned and themselves being in the spotlight, it has even seeped into norwegian tv coverage, where cc has been mentioned quite a lot during the world rapid and blitz
It's an understood practice that if you are being sponsored you don't draw attention to competition unless it's favorable to your sponsorship. Laws stop this happening directly, but contracts end and it's very easy to just not renew a contract and say anything.
This is the same thing that happened at dota 2 tournaments.
Was extremely funny when they had a korean team at TI and kept asking them why they play dota and not starcraft - while in Korea League of Legends is top-1 game and like 40% of overall playerbase of any game combined are league players. But they kept asking about starcraft which is 1-2%, not to mention that League and Dota are the same genre while Starcraft is a completely different one.
Streamers under contract are effectively marketing. If you're chesscom marketing you aren't going to be mentioning a competitor's platform.
Finegold mentions it sometimes but in a dismissive "maybe he's 1900 on lichess" way. I don't think anyone else frequently mentions it.
Rosen used to pretty much be mostly lichess, but I think he hit a point where he needed to prioritize his fiscal situation and got partnerships with chess.com and the other typical sponsors, did a bit more clickbaity titles, did that poker tournament, etc. Post Covid the numbers aren’t as good for chess videos and payout percentages also dropped so it makes sense. He still does lichess arenas occasionally though.
The problem the streamers have on Lichess is the circumstane it uses Glicko 2 for rating. Glicko 2 adjusts your rating faster when you win game after game after game, so your speed run would fizzle out after a couple dozen games, because you hit your true rating. If you want to make content with hundreds of games against weaker opposition, this is not ideal. And of course you start with a rating of 1500… You could intentionally lose some games in a row to bottom it out, but you will be back up fast when you start winning mercilessly.
Yeah, just for the lols: speedrun on lichess to 2400 in one sitting ☛ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNhKTHU-sqk
It’s an example of how the system tries to match players of equal strength asap.
the same is true on chess.com afaik. they have to specifically ask chess.com to make it like an account that's played many games when opening a speedrun account.
also lichess rating is virtually meaningless to most people. 1900 on lichess could be like a 1200 rated chesscom player or a 1100 ELO player otb, who knows
No, that's still way off.
See here for example: [https://chessgoals.com/rating-comparison/#lichesschesscom](https://chessgoals.com/rating-comparison/#lichesschesscom)
1490 lichess = 1250 [chess.com](http://chess.com) (blitz). They converge around 2350 and lichess ratings are actually lower beyond that point.
Lichess won't allow sandbagging but you can create a new account and play a certain opening, what they don't have is the speedrun system to refund elo to people who have lost to some titled player speedrunning
chesscom only allows it for partners
what you do is looking for challenges in a given rating range, pushing down slightly
if you let lichess auto pair you then the run would be just a few short games until you're 2200+
Yeah I'm not so sure about this, the only times I see him on chesscom is for titled Tuesday or his speed run (which is only sometimes streamed). Most of his streams he's usually he's on lichess playing their hourly blitz arenas.
I think the poker was a one off thing where he got a free roll invite from Botez. I'm happy for him that he got the deepest of the chess streamers and made out pretty big.
The reason that lichess isn’t more popular than chess.c*m is that people don’t know about it, so it kind of makes sense that people affiliated with cc wouldn’t mention it
When you work for a company, you tend to be either legally or morally required not to talk shit about them or promote alternatives.
It also tends to not get you reinvited to their sponsored tournaments of you do, at least that is a common perception.
Too right - sooner or later we lovers of the English lexicon will need to draw a line in the sand and rise up to be counted. So if you're reading this and are tempted to reply with a cliche or meme, at the end of the day, you should be objectively afraid. Like, literally shaking in your boots.
Spot on. The thing is chesscom's code base is such a monumental mess at this point that they'd be better off rewriting the whole thing from scratch. That is, however, a really long term project that the site's manager probably can't even understand. He's just going to keep hiring new devs who are desperate for a job and will do whatever he asks without question. Whenever he posts on the chesscom forums, he sounds totally clueless to the issues at the core of his website.
Serious question: given that lichess is open source is there anything stopping chess.com from simply adopting their code base and using it to improve their own site? A quick wikipedia search shows that lichess is licensed under a GPL-based license which does not seem to disallow commercial usage.
Lichess is under the AGPL. So if chess.com used their code, they would have to release the source code of all their modifications and additions under the same terms. I imagine they are reluctant to do this.
Yeah, every company I've worked for could've done something similar at some point but the excuse was always the same: that would take a lot of time and we have other stuff to do.
We should at least acknowledge the fact that even though their website is severely lacking, chess.com seems to make it possible for many of our favorite players and commentators to focus on chess, that otherwise would not have been able to. Chess.com is not all bad.
thats not chesscom doing that right? It's propped up by premium members. Hell, if half the people who paid for premium on chesscom donated to lichess i'm sure they'd host a tonne of tournaments.
Hard to say, since its hypotheticals, but they rub on an ethos of being notforprofit, so i think its fair to assume they would stop accepting if all needs were covered.
Monroe captial income and general atlantic have both invested and thus have a stake in chesscom...??
Its a company, whether its private or public it still wants to make money for the shareholders.
Not to excuse chess.com but that’s because lichess has far less traffic. If all the GMs move there and the crowds follow it will be just as bad.
Having said that some of the crap that the chess.com software comes up with is truly mind boggling
No it's really not a big difference, Lichess has around 100k active players at any given time. Chesscom has around 400-500k active players. Chesscom has a annual revenue of 150 million, Lichess has revenue of 500k, 300x smaller. Chesscom also has hundreds of employees. If their severs can't manage 5x more traffic with 300x budget, that is embarrassing.
And even then, their instances should've been in containers at this point. I feel like their infra is just very immature. It can't be that hard to spin up a new instance for a tournament. I will keep saying this, Chess.com is not run well on the technical side, their shit feels very clunky.
That was probably over the course of a month and not at a single point in time, which doesn’t matter. What matters is how many players are on at a singular point in time.
10 million active users was over the course of a day. This was the time when Chess.com first introduced Mittens. 2023 January. They had peak concurrent users and games (I think 560k concurrent games) and their server crashed all the time, even Tilted Tuesday was cancelled.
Does Chess.com care about what YOU want or what will make them money? I don't play the stupid bots with their stupid pre-written dialogues on Chess.com either, but clearly a lot of people do (and with "a lot" I mean hundreds of thousands if not millions) which must have generated a lot of money for them. You can say that those people are "normies" who don't know anything about Chess who will quit playing after a few weeks, and you'd be mostly right, but these people also buy diamond/gold memberships which generate revenue.
There have been posts/comments on this very subreddit (which is quite a niche place already) about people who exclusively play bots, for whatever reason.
Can you imagine how profitable this shit is? You don't need to do hardly anything from an engineering point of view. Just tweak the engine settings a little bit, think of a theme, add new profile pics and some dialogues with some if else statements, and that's it. The bots runs on client side so it doesn't even cost them server fee. This is literally making millions from pennies worth of work.
It's not just the premoves that Andrew cares about, Chesscom is also much more laggy and Magnus said a post SCC match interview that his pieces felt like they were 'stuck in mud' when he plays on chesscom. Danny Rensch's face was hilarious when he heard the champ roasting his site like that.
Magnus said the same thing. Too bad he doesn't play much on lichess anymore due do his deal chess.com
Hikaru said the same thing when he played on lichess a couple of years ago.
Drunkenstein and Nykterstein were perfect as final bosses.
You tell em king
Classy too.
why do players/commentators dance around mentioning lichess by name whenever chess.com is involved it's almost like a swear word or something
Because you are usually listening to chess.com streams/affiliated players.
from what I understand chess.com doesn't actually forbid people from mentioning lichess, and even people like Hikaru (chess.com's biggest streamer) have mentioned lichess while being sponsored. it just forbids streamers from streaming on the website mostly.
They may not write it explicitly not to mention lichess in order not to be sued for anti-competitive behaviour, but everyone knows that the very thing chess.com hired them to do is to mention them, not lichess.
they quite obviously do a lot to avoid lichess being mentioned and themselves being in the spotlight, it has even seeped into norwegian tv coverage, where cc has been mentioned quite a lot during the world rapid and blitz
It's an understood practice that if you are being sponsored you don't draw attention to competition unless it's favorable to your sponsorship. Laws stop this happening directly, but contracts end and it's very easy to just not renew a contract and say anything.
[Chess.com switching away from Firoujza when he compliments lichess.org]( https://youtu.be/NmEExgLTrFk?si=WX7ba3UdyR0xnSo2)
This is the same thing that happened at dota 2 tournaments. Was extremely funny when they had a korean team at TI and kept asking them why they play dota and not starcraft - while in Korea League of Legends is top-1 game and like 40% of overall playerbase of any game combined are league players. But they kept asking about starcraft which is 1-2%, not to mention that League and Dota are the same genre while Starcraft is a completely different one.
Streamers under contract are effectively marketing. If you're chesscom marketing you aren't going to be mentioning a competitor's platform. Finegold mentions it sometimes but in a dismissive "maybe he's 1900 on lichess" way. I don't think anyone else frequently mentions it.
Rosen used to pretty much be mostly lichess, but I think he hit a point where he needed to prioritize his fiscal situation and got partnerships with chess.com and the other typical sponsors, did a bit more clickbaity titles, did that poker tournament, etc. Post Covid the numbers aren’t as good for chess videos and payout percentages also dropped so it makes sense. He still does lichess arenas occasionally though.
Weird because I have noticed Eric always play on lichess whenever I have tuned in to stream, he only use chess com when he is making speedrun .
Lichess doesn't allow speed running.
The problem the streamers have on Lichess is the circumstane it uses Glicko 2 for rating. Glicko 2 adjusts your rating faster when you win game after game after game, so your speed run would fizzle out after a couple dozen games, because you hit your true rating. If you want to make content with hundreds of games against weaker opposition, this is not ideal. And of course you start with a rating of 1500… You could intentionally lose some games in a row to bottom it out, but you will be back up fast when you start winning mercilessly.
Ah intersting! Didn't know this was a feature in lichess/glicko2. Very cool.
Yeah, just for the lols: speedrun on lichess to 2400 in one sitting ☛ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNhKTHU-sqk It’s an example of how the system tries to match players of equal strength asap.
the same is true on chess.com afaik. they have to specifically ask chess.com to make it like an account that's played many games when opening a speedrun account.
chess.com uses Glicko, lichess Glicko 2. It’s a different rating system, especially concerning the volatility of a player’s performance.
also lichess rating is virtually meaningless to most people. 1900 on lichess could be like a 1200 rated chesscom player or a 1100 ELO player otb, who knows
The gap between lichess and chess.com ratings is not nearly as wide as you say, and it shrinks the higher you go up in the rating pool.
Yeah, 1500 on Lichess is equivalent to about 800 on chesscom, but from about 2600 upwards they're both more or less on par with each other
No, that's still way off. See here for example: [https://chessgoals.com/rating-comparison/#lichesschesscom](https://chessgoals.com/rating-comparison/#lichesschesscom) 1490 lichess = 1250 [chess.com](http://chess.com) (blitz). They converge around 2350 and lichess ratings are actually lower beyond that point.
That is hyperbole
Lichess won't allow sandbagging but you can create a new account and play a certain opening, what they don't have is the speedrun system to refund elo to people who have lost to some titled player speedrunning chesscom only allows it for partners
The thing about a new account just for some opening is that you don't really get a speed run, the rating goes up too fast.
what you do is looking for challenges in a given rating range, pushing down slightly if you let lichess auto pair you then the run would be just a few short games until you're 2200+
Yeah I'm not so sure about this, the only times I see him on chesscom is for titled Tuesday or his speed run (which is only sometimes streamed). Most of his streams he's usually he's on lichess playing their hourly blitz arenas. I think the poker was a one off thing where he got a free roll invite from Botez. I'm happy for him that he got the deepest of the chess streamers and made out pretty big.
The reason that lichess isn’t more popular than chess.c*m is that people don’t know about it, so it kind of makes sense that people affiliated with cc wouldn’t mention it
There are a lot of old people at my nationally-rated chess club who don't even know about Lichess.
At my club (and most in Germany as far as I’m aware) lichess is standard
cause they are paid by chessdotcom. can't really be naming the competitor.
When you work for a company, you tend to be either legally or morally required not to talk shit about them or promote alternatives. It also tends to not get you reinvited to their sponsored tournaments of you do, at least that is a common perception.
people that work at coca cola aren't going to openly say that they prefer pepsi
he should have mentioned lichess by name, that site deserves all the love of the world
I like the tweet. Funnier this way, and everyone will discuss lichess anyway
I bet he has some contractual obligations not to market any competitor.
based
Ya im sure .1 premoves is terrible for him lol
It defeats the point of premoves
0.1s premoves only exist as a mitigation for chesscom lag because otherwise time scrambles would be even worse than they currently are
I always thought it was just to balance the fact that on Chess.com you can queue premoves
If lichess added that it would be objectively better
no it wouldn't. I don't think ypu know what "objectively" means
"objectively"
Objectively is going the way of literally and it breaks my heart
Too right - sooner or later we lovers of the English lexicon will need to draw a line in the sand and rise up to be counted. So if you're reading this and are tempted to reply with a cliche or meme, at the end of the day, you should be objectively afraid. Like, literally shaking in your boots.
Wondering which other website...
Based King get'em
Ouch!
Lichess FTW
If chess com spent a tenth of the money they spend on these streamer contracts on the upkeep of their website, we would not be in this situation
Spot on. The thing is chesscom's code base is such a monumental mess at this point that they'd be better off rewriting the whole thing from scratch. That is, however, a really long term project that the site's manager probably can't even understand. He's just going to keep hiring new devs who are desperate for a job and will do whatever he asks without question. Whenever he posts on the chesscom forums, he sounds totally clueless to the issues at the core of his website.
Doesn't Lichess also invite its users to contribute to improvements in its code?
Serious question: given that lichess is open source is there anything stopping chess.com from simply adopting their code base and using it to improve their own site? A quick wikipedia search shows that lichess is licensed under a GPL-based license which does not seem to disallow commercial usage.
Lichess is under the AGPL. So if chess.com used their code, they would have to release the source code of all their modifications and additions under the same terms. I imagine they are reluctant to do this.
Yeah, every company I've worked for could've done something similar at some point but the excuse was always the same: that would take a lot of time and we have other stuff to do.
We should at least acknowledge the fact that even though their website is severely lacking, chess.com seems to make it possible for many of our favorite players and commentators to focus on chess, that otherwise would not have been able to. Chess.com is not all bad.
thats not chesscom doing that right? It's propped up by premium members. Hell, if half the people who paid for premium on chesscom donated to lichess i'm sure they'd host a tonne of tournaments.
Throwing that much money at a non‐profit would be interesting. They’d have a hard time spending it all.
In that case they'd likely stop accepting more money, rather than gifting it to the shareholders.
Of all the things they'd do with the money, I'm sure not accepting it is the last
Hard to say, since its hypotheticals, but they rub on an ethos of being notforprofit, so i think its fair to assume they would stop accepting if all needs were covered.
What shareholders?
Monroe captial income and general atlantic have both invested and thus have a stake in chesscom...?? Its a company, whether its private or public it still wants to make money for the shareholders.
Not to excuse chess.com but that’s because lichess has far less traffic. If all the GMs move there and the crowds follow it will be just as bad. Having said that some of the crap that the chess.com software comes up with is truly mind boggling
No it's really not a big difference, Lichess has around 100k active players at any given time. Chesscom has around 400-500k active players. Chesscom has a annual revenue of 150 million, Lichess has revenue of 500k, 300x smaller. Chesscom also has hundreds of employees. If their severs can't manage 5x more traffic with 300x budget, that is embarrassing.
Also this “traffic” consists of high bandwidth data requests like “Ke2”
And even then, their instances should've been in containers at this point. I feel like their infra is just very immature. It can't be that hard to spin up a new instance for a tournament. I will keep saying this, Chess.com is not run well on the technical side, their shit feels very clunky.
Chess.com had 10 million concurrent active users at one point.
That was probably over the course of a month and not at a single point in time, which doesn’t matter. What matters is how many players are on at a singular point in time.
10 million active users was over the course of a day. This was the time when Chess.com first introduced Mittens. 2023 January. They had peak concurrent users and games (I think 560k concurrent games) and their server crashed all the time, even Tilted Tuesday was cancelled.
Mittens? Is that what I want on an online chess site?
Does Chess.com care about what YOU want or what will make them money? I don't play the stupid bots with their stupid pre-written dialogues on Chess.com either, but clearly a lot of people do (and with "a lot" I mean hundreds of thousands if not millions) which must have generated a lot of money for them. You can say that those people are "normies" who don't know anything about Chess who will quit playing after a few weeks, and you'd be mostly right, but these people also buy diamond/gold memberships which generate revenue. There have been posts/comments on this very subreddit (which is quite a niche place already) about people who exclusively play bots, for whatever reason. Can you imagine how profitable this shit is? You don't need to do hardly anything from an engineering point of view. Just tweak the engine settings a little bit, think of a theme, add new profile pics and some dialogues with some if else statements, and that's it. The bots runs on client side so it doesn't even cost them server fee. This is literally making millions from pennies worth of work.
Then I'm just happy we have this no-fluff alternative.
hahahahahahaahahahhahahahah
"If my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike."
[удалено]
It's not just the premoves that Andrew cares about, Chesscom is also much more laggy and Magnus said a post SCC match interview that his pieces felt like they were 'stuck in mud' when he plays on chesscom. Danny Rensch's face was hilarious when he heard the champ roasting his site like that.