Anybody use LICHESS? I got tired of FICS. (I play in GUEST mode).
It seems like FICS has considerable less players, although my cellphone doesn’t give any actual data on that subject, but LICHESS does.
Seems like on FICS, I’m often either playing a chess engine or much higher rated players than me. Maybe that’s chased a lot of players away. -Including me. Either it has a lot of guests playing with a chess engine or it just has really good players that have chased out the more casual players. In any event, it seems like the server population has gotten really low over the years.
LICHESS seems to have a low of over 10,000 active players and often over 20,000 players, and several thousand games being played at any given time. I also feel like I’m playing another human being most of the time. It often has over 20,000 players. Although again I’m only in guest mode. I can go several days without feeling like I just got crushed by a chess engine. Often longer. With FICS, in guest mode, it’s often, it seems like I’m played a chess engine, then I come back a few hours later and still getting insanely crushed. Insanely crushed means inside of 10 moves being obliterated. Not check mated, but clearly busted with no hope of making a feeble comeback. I rarely win against players much above 1850, but I can usually get to a decent endgame, or at least a late middle game. That is, I can occasionally draw against someone in the 1800 to 1900 range, maybe even a bit higher if the opponent is having a bad day.
Maybe someday I’ll get a paid account on ICC someday. Seems like the grand daddy of pay-to-play servers is the best out there. I suppose Playchess.com is really good too, but it’s rather heavy on European players. I haven’t really looked into Playchess.com in about 8 or 9 years. I’m assuming it hasn’t changed much since then.
I did some light research, and Chess.com seems to be better for beginners. Also, some people have posted online that Chess.com has gotten too big for a web based site. They didn’t specify what the problem was, but apparently there are some issues with it. But seems good if your a beginner still, if just for the loads of training stuff on it.
I suspect the problems run along the same lines as Yahoo chess. I haven’t played that site in 20 years at least, and have no idea if it even still exists. The problems were numerous, and pretty much could be explained by the fact that it was a web based chess server.
Are there any other normal chess servers out there? The only ones I’m sure of is FICS, LICHESS, and ICC, and Playchess.com.
-Normal as in they use a chess interface and not a web browser.