Lichess.orgReviews 62

After pogo stopped their chest site... the good... I tried numerous chest sites... and lichess has/had the best graphics and speed... the bad... the players and site has so many glitches! People cheat... the site has so many glitches... it is NOT a real chest site... and fu kim the fake ratings... cheaters, glitches... way too many issues...

When you get onto lichess it's pretty good, the gameplay is good, the communications is good, you get unlimited puzzles, but the problem is when you do lessons, all you are doing is puzzles, sure on chess.com you do do puzzles, but on chess.com you also get a video lesson. Overall it is pretty good, but if you want lessons you have to choose (in my opinion) low quality lesson lichess, or pretty good, but you only get them once a week. Unlike chess.com though, lichess does have a voice chat function which I will agree i do enjoy when playing chess against my friend, but there are three flaws about lichess that I think should be addressed, number one being the lessons which is the main reason I am writing this review, the bots (no I mean seriously, even though I am a rated 1000 player I still sometimes want to beat some rated 250 robots a*s up from time to time), and the layout, I just feel like lichess is going for that basic "It's not the vibe" kind of layout when I know that lichess can do better, when I go to the time management to change the time control, it be looking like some s**t out from coolmathgames mixed with some Cardi B kind of s**t.

Horrible and arrogant behavior by the appeals committee. Below is the response that they sent on one of my son's account. He is just a beginner who is starting to learn chess and like to practice games on lichess because his coaching academy uses this site to teach him. Not sure why they dont want to allow new players who is learning to make couple of mistakes. If they are not comfortable, they can just restrict beginners from playing rated games. But these people are so arrogant that they decided to block the accounts permanently.

"Your account was closed because you have broken our rules on at least two other accounts.

You are no longer permitted to create new accounts.

We will only consider giving you another chance if you appeal again after 6 months. This waiting period is mandatory and will not be shortened for any reason.

We have the right to take strong action against users who repeatedly break our rules (lichess.org/terms-of-service) on multiple accounts by for example using engine or external assistance, sending offensive or "spam" messages, registering an unnecessary number of accounts, or trying to evade playbans."

Good software. Bad community of people. Developer is using this site to polish his over-inflated ego. They have a hivemind gang mentality and group up on individuals questioning their superiority.

Neither Lichess nor Chess – Play and Learn, aka Chess.com, provide anything close to the service their public relations spin claims they provide. I have screenshots of vicious verbal abuse threatening violence from members of both chess app developers, sent well over 10 screenshots documenting all manner of cheating, game abandoning, delay tactics, and verbal abuse to Google (the attached screenshots are from Lichess, but similar experience comes through Chess.com). I also quoted Google's own policies for software app developers back to Google, documenting point by point the daily violations both companies were engaged in. Google did absolutely nothing but give me the run around for nearly a year. Conclusion? Big tech does exactly what it wants if it means profit, and ignores abuses of many kinds outright, then lies directly to the public with public relations statements that have no relation to their actual practices

There is zero support on this site. Not even an email link. Which considering your bombarded by "donate " prompts is terrible. This also means that moderators... abuse their powers and can allow cheating/ban whoever they like... making for the fairness factor to not be there on this site.

I play a lot of chess online, and it used to be good fun. But lately, most chess websites such as Lichess, Chess.com Gameknot and Playchess.com are being run by a bunch of control freaks. When you play at these sites, I learned that you are not playing actual players, but rather a bot or the owners of the sites that are purposely making stupid moves. (sic) They do this to try and trick you get to become a member and pay for a membership. This is deceptive and really unfair for people who can't afford it. Also, it does a diservice to the game itself. You would think that they would want to promote the game for all, but for them it's just about the money. I guess they think people are stupid. But it just goes to show how stupid they are, because players like me will gradually stop playing at their websites and they will eventually become a cyber bot wasteland. It's mentally sadistic and truly sad for the game of chess.

Further, I want to thank sitejabber for giving people like myself the chance to vent their anger and frustration, as well as exposing the fraudulent behavior of these sites.

Bans the account if he wants with no proof. He is most likely a dictator. I am sorry for him. I was thinking that it is a better website than chess.com, but hell no. Chess.com is the king. Thibault makes people second-class citizen if he wants.

I started playing chess in 2011. At chess com at the time. But since 2016 I play in lichess...
I am stunned from the level of cheating I meet there. I play for 10 years, I had lessons for chess before pandemic for 4 years and I can solve puzzles well. I am a person able to put checkmate in 7 moves if I have to.
At this place my bullet rating is 1500. I lose 90 % of my games, for a year playing somewhere around 10K games I won with checkmate 1K of them. The rest 9K - lost over time or lost due to checkmate. I never resign. Ever.
This website is ether full of cheaters or I am the most sore loser ever.
I think it is the first, since for 2 days playing from 1200 bullet rating I jumped to 1700 rating. This due to the fact I was reporting all of my games for those days as cheating ones. And receiving notifications that my opponents were caught.
But I still lose most of my games, because I can't know is someone cheating when I play.
I am giving up. This is pointless. Why there is so many cheaters?
Why when I report them in forum no one is responding my posts?
Obviously I was being muted.
I am no longer going to play chess there. It is pointless waste of time. Even people call me crazy and noob all the time. No punishment. At all.
Sick of it. Lichess, Good bye!

The worst matchmaking system I've ever seen. Rating is not at all coresponding to the real skills. From 800 to 1800 people are basically with same skills.

Anyone trying Lichess.org as a free online chess club will be disappointed. Whether you play for a month or three years, sooner or later you will realize what Lichess amounts to: engine chess cheaters haven lased with loony bin administrators that close accounts for cheaters, non-cheaters, and chess talents alike. The player rating system is a disaster where you could play against ten different players of similar levels, win nine games, draw the last and end up with beginner's rating. The website always claim thousands of players logged at a time, yet always have a handfull of people available to play a game with. Players personal stats seem to claim non existing games and their wins and loses. And despite draconian treatment to visitors of this website in the name of stopping cheating, cheaters are dime a dozen, and if you are good at chess, the administrators will treat you as a cheater too. There are writers who are clearly hired to defend this worthless website typically stating that its dissatisfied visitors are the problem and not Lichess. This is usually a similar tactic to all bad products/services where junk positive reviews are created to drown the mountain of negative reviews revealing the truth. Don't take my word for it. Try this website for a while. I promise you, you will give up, become a cheater yourself, or get your account removed.

Now let me explain more about Lichess.org which claims to be a free online chess club. There is no such thing as free lunch. Its founder Thibault stated that he doesn't play chess much. He also stated that he doesn't care what visitors to his website think of it, and if they don't like it, tough. Then why did he create a free club for a game he doesn't even care about, for people he doesn't care about either? Well, he is not a communist hippie as many has claimed him to be. What he is actually is an artificial intelligence computer programmer. In other words, he is one of those who destroyed chess by creating the chess engine problem that they claim to be fighting against. Its like those who created the nuclear bomb claiming to want to undo its danger. Too late, it can't be undone.

See, chess was used as the fruit fly of A. I. scientists to learn and practice their evolving field with. The creators of the so called chess engines claim that these wonderful software programs can be used as great practice and analysis tool for chess players and not intended for cheating. What they don't mention is that these programs are not designed really to play like humans, but harness the immense numeric calculating power of the computer. Watching your numeric calculator getting accurate answers to math operations in a fraction of a second will not make you any better or faster at crunching numbers in your head anymore than watching a chess engine program destroy its opponent with perfectly calculated moves will make you play anywhere near its level.

To summarize, chess playing experience at Lichess is never a pleasant one. Its ratings are junk and its administrators are online power junkies. Its founder claim a free service but he gets unknown donation money amounts from his visitors that he abuses. All his claimed numbers seem highly manipulated and should lead to formal criminal investigation.

If you try and accuse someone of cheating you'll get a sleazy message saying repeating this will result in loss of communication. Which is ironic because I was trying to communicate and you've lost me as a player. Just awful. Zero stars.

Time never ends unless your opponent leaves the game. Your opponent could recover from 2 seconds to 6 seconds every game

Liuchess is a very big fraud app. If someone wins all the games in the tournament it just exits from the user accout and shows that the user has violated the rules when he has not. It just cant tolerate the contionous win of somebody.

Lichess.org allows too many cheaters. Do yourself a favor, download chess.com. Thank you. Can't choose photo that I took.

There are A LOT of players that made their account in (For example) in 2011 or 2013, and they played 1 or 2 games and quit, there are a lot of good usernames that are taken because of players like this...
Please make that if a player is offline (Quit) then ban there account or something!
Also, if you are about to mate someone in 1 move, or win, but your time runs out... Please make it just be a draw because a lot of games and rating is dropped because of mate in 1 missed opportunity
Thank You!

This is the best chess website ever they deal with cheaters fast you can play in tornamints in all sorts of variants you would join this website you can have your kid have kid mode and there are teams on lichess on I one to 10 it's a 100,000,000,000

Played here for 6 months and then suddenly my account gets restricted. I email them and they reply with a one sentence email saying I have been using computer assistance. My rating is 1700 on blitz, 1800 on Bullet and 2000 on rapid. My rating on 1 minute games are similar to what i have when i play 10min games. I beat a few good players at 2000 rating but have lost to several between 1200-1600 (not sure how they got that low rating and played insanely good but whatever). Noticed that when you play 1 min games, some players don't even think for a second. I played a game with 35 moves each, i lost on time and my opponent used 3 seconds. Not humanly possible. So looks like they have tons of people cheating using bots, and they dont care about those but restrict people who try and play fair.
Worst site and support/admins are completely frauds.