Summer is here, birds are singing, flowers are blooming, ice-creams are melting and lichess is hosting a 24-Hour Marathon Tournament!

This Marathon event is a gruelling arena tournament featuring 24 continuous hours of 5+0 Blitz madness amongst thousands of lichess players. The winner of this incredible feat of endurance will be crowned with a magnificent trophy icon, as will the top 10 and top 50 finalists (although they won't be nearly so magnificent).

You may remember that the last 24-Hour Marathon event that we hosted was slightly less than successful, to the point that we ended up awarding “I survived the lichess Marathon” trophies to all that participated. Not to be deterred from past failures, the tournament system was completely overhauled and is now fully prepared for the insanity that is about to be unleashed. We tested the new system back in June with an Experimental Bullet Tournament (Won by Velocity-Chess) with resounding success, the lichess servers handled an event with over 500 players without even blinking! Expect lichess's regular smooth performance for the whole duration of this tournament.

And for those mortals who don't necessarily feel like staying up all night, you don't have to be awake for the whole tournament in order to participate. You can still join in the fun by simply withdrawing from the tournament for a quick nap and re-join at a later time with all your points still intact.

The Summer Marathon Tournament starts at 00:00 GMT on Saturday the 1st of August, so if you think you have what it takes to be the ultimate champion of chess endurance, you can visit the tournament page to join all the action.

And as if the Summer Marathon Tournament wasn't enough to excite you, we've been working on a big new feature for the site and we wanted to share a few little snippets of what you can expect to see on lichess very soon.