Exciting stuff is going on. Let's keep you in the loop.

Horde chess unveiled during ChessWhiz Cup

[EDIT] The ChessWhiz Cup is over! Our illustrious winner is goldilocks, who is a prolific curator of fine chess videos. The new variant is none other than Horde Chess but with a custom starting layout built for balance. Join us in the forum to help us balance this variant further.

How would you like to win a cash prize in a Lichess tournament? We’re pleased to announce a new tournament to be hosted on Lichess: the ChessWhiz Cup, sponsored by ChessWhiz TV.

The time control is 4 minutes per side, with no time added per move, but there’s just one catch — it’s not exactly chess. The event features a new chess variant, specially designed to thwart cheaters and sprain the brain. The exact rules to the variant will be kept secret until immediately before the tournaments starts, so be ready.

The tournament starts sharply at 3pm GMT on Saturday, March 21st, and will last about 90 minutes. The grand prize is 0.1 bitcoins.

For more information, head over to the forum topic. Good luck to all participants!

Mobile app upgrades

Both Android and iOS apps are upgraded to version 1.2.0. Upgrade should be automatic.

As promised in the previous blog post, it's now possible to play an offline artificial intelligence!

Rating filters in game creation are now possible, by popular request.

Finally we managed to squeeze even more speed out of the application, we got rid of the last known bugs, and improved on the translations.

Fair play monitoring improvements

To ensure a healthy competition, we know how important it is to fight all forms of cheating. Every day, lichess moderators and automated algorithms are kicking 50 bad players out. It's really working beautifully, and lichess may very well be the most secure site to play on!

But because some people will always try to find new ways to cheat, we're always working on improving our defenses. Recently we automated sandbagging and boosting detection, with great results. And now Clarkey is building a new version of our computer assistance detector, to alleviate the moderator team work by taking precise decisions very quickly. I can tell you it's a wonderful piece of code, and I feel very sorry for the engine users out there. :)

Lichess rocks

No big news. But did you know we made it to the second most popular chess website?

That's right. lichess is more popular than fide.com. We outperform many websites that have invested tons of money. And all that without raising a single cent, therefore without needing to earn a single cent!

How do we do it? With an awesome community! Yes, that's you. Because lichess is free and respects you, you become contributors. You write code, you design interfaces, you make mobile apps, you write translations, you moderate the site.

Together we're making it to the top, and we prove our point to the world: the best things in life are free.

Thank you all!