All their finances are also public: https://lichess.org/costs
I'm not sure what to think, but that's definitely interesting. I wonder what chess.com is paying their engineers.
With just a few employees, it is quite interesting to compare how much do some of these contributions cost, effectively affecting only a person or two, compared to a service like Lichess which is used by 5-10 million of users each month.
Even my diamond platinum extreme chess.com subscription (or however the third-best tier of a dozen or so is called) has much less functionality than Lichess's only tier.
I'm a Lichess patron and happy to see them get support, but I do feel a bit bad for chess.com in this case. Magnus is such a big figure in chess that organizations like FIDE and chess.com feel they have no choice but to accommodate his whims, but that doesn't come with any guarantees. I hope Lichess does not find themselves in a poor position if Magnus decides to "alter the deal".
I'm sure they'll be crying all the way to the bank.
> I hope Lichess does not find themselves in a poor position if Magnus decides to "alter the deal".
I also hope they manage to avoid becoming dependent on whatever this deal grants them.
The best thing they did was that they bought an amazing domain name.
FIDE and chess.com did behave pretty shitty sometimes and I think its good Magnus is in a position to counter them a bit.
> Magnus Carlsen, co-founder of Take Take Take, will not be actively promoting the platform at launch. With Take Take Take now offering a full play and learning experience, it enters territory that conflicts with his ambassador agreement with Chess.com. He remains a co-founder and the company's largest shareholder, and the team expects his involvement to resume once those contractual constraints change. For now, the product will have to speak for itself.
[0] https://lichess.org/@/revoof/blog/optimizing-the-tablebase-s...
It's an understatement how well optimized they are right down to the optimization techniques that they use and the infra providers that they use. The same thing even in something like AWS could cause significantly more amount of money.
It also shows that you don't need AWS/GCP/Azure for basically just about everything, to be honest.
Lichess is a beacon of hope and congrats to the lichess team for this cooperation with TTT.
That's where they won, people think AWS/GCP/Azure has to be the default while in reality, the number of platforms that actually need to be able to scale up/down fast are probably below 1% of all platforms out there. Most platforms would save money and run better with proper dedicated hardware rather than going for clouds by default.
Flashback to a moment in my life where a team pushed (successfully) for building a distributed architecture for an app that we didn't even knew if it had product market fit yet. Fast forward 3 years to today and the app is no longer online, but while it had 5 users they were using really reliable infrastructure, I guess that's cool.
OVH does not have that many availability zones or regions either
Saving money is a good thing but QOS also matters.
Their Oauth requires to special app registration nor any oauth secrets - only platform I have seen that does that.
I do wonder how this opens up ability for people to integrate Lichess’ player pool to their own apps.
chess67 looks interesting from my perspective as a coach and club organizer, especially for running tournaments and gaining exposure for my coaching and events.
But I do wonder where the boundary is long term. If more tools start tapping into the player pool, there’s probably a balance between staying open and preventing people from just free riding on the Lichess ecosystem.
Either way, it’s pretty unique. You don’t really see that level of accessibility elsewhere in the chess world.
So I literally dusted off an old Android tablet and played one game. Pleased to see I got logged right in to my lichess account, played a 10 + 5 unrated, did game review. I think this should be great for everybody all around, and as others have expressed I hope lichess doesn't get caught up in some business grief. The game review was not earth-shattering but decent move-by-move explanation that I think will help a lot of players, especially newer players.
I will stick to playing on lichess in browser, on a 43" tv monitor, running and reading local Stockfish eval., without the English explan.
Above all, with everything that's happening in the software engineering world rn, I look at Chess as a place were we've seen it play out in the past decades. And Lichess is a big part of that.
I hope this deal helps two things: (1) Bring more people to Chess, (2) Actually, help Lichess find out a way to reward those working in it as much as they deserve.
Keep on the amazing work,
The only thing I love about chess.com is the ability to create custom variants, edit them, and unleash them into the wild. Been loving minihouse lately, such a cool variant.
Would love to see Lichess add bughouse, as its cousin Pychess recently debuted it and it seems to work fine. Chess.com has bughouse.
> Anyways competition is good.
I agree, and I have no issue with competition paid or free, but I’d have hoped that the paid one would at least also offer a better product.
I’m also to pay for chess courses! Chess.com is just not worth the price to me. I like their narrated game reviews slightly better than Lichess’s purely centipawn-driven mistake practice system, but everything else about their interface is much worse.
I can imagine a lot of small apps buy into serverless at a time where it’s legitimately the most cost-effective solution and then they’re stuck because serverless platforms are easy to lock yourself into.
This. I kind of wish if more people knew about it. Also even 1% can be too big. I mean Lichess is literally having millions of people if not more, It's definitely within the 0.001% group.
I kind of wish to do something in this space in the future, I do feel like its just that people don't know about it. I have been thinking to approach some companies and just tell them how much they can save if they migrate and use open source solutions and these dedi servers and setting things on top of these dedi's/vps's.
I have been thinking of (within future), to contact a few companies and to actually have them save net money from migration while charging them a few hundred bucks a month and I can just have a very handful selection of companies (say 15-20) to have enough money so that I can eat french fries and manage their servers!
It feels a win-win-win situation for everyone except AWS/GCP/Azure who wish to suggest that scalability is hard etc. and this false premise for most if not essentially* all businesses.
Personally, I am also saying things like slack for example, I don't understand why people might want slack when things like matrix exist and can be self-hosted securely with proper 3-2-1 backups and for most intents and purposes is actually good if not better than slack.
To me, a bit of concern though with this and I am not sure if it is well-founded is what if I set these servers for them, now I will wish to set them up so that they have as little errors as possible but what if the companies start to think that I am doing nothing and then they stop paying my contracts after I have set them up on these dedicated. I guess I hope that they believe in the value of human support and I guess I am also a bit unsure of where do I find such businesses are.
My brother does some freelancing on the side and I ask him these things and he mentions that mostly he has to use AWS, I mention why not dedi and he says that he does what he is asked to do and that company wants him to use AWS so he uses AWS, so I guess within this context, I need companies who are atleast interested in being a bit more open about thinking about dedicated servers.
I am sure that there would be companies interested in all of this and I am interested in doing things for them but I am not sure about the middle part of connecting the two. I would be genuinely interested to hear your thoughts on all of this and have a nice day emsh!
He's not the first person to be "really good at chess".
It's a broad statement meant to mean "celebrities have too big of a platform and too much influence over the average joe".
You think Magnus should be forced to participate in chess events he doesn't enjoy / doesn't like the format of? Or you think organizations like FIDE or chess.com should be blocked from trying to entice Magnus to participate in their events?
Please be more specific and concrete.
Mistral is *for* profit.
(Excluding purely "money washing for local mafia and politicians" non profits.)
And Thibault iirc is the kind of person that's not terribly interested in earning lots of money. Of he wanted to, I'm sure he could make bajillions elsewhere in tech, because he's that good. But he apparently prefers to only work for a "measly" upper middle class salary and doing something he's really passionate about. And I thank him for it, because lichess is awesome.