Raji A.

To get rated as a chess player, you have to pay to join a tournament. You also might have to pay to travel and stay in a different city. You have to play a lot each day. All this trouble just to get a real FIDE ratings, but then you have a better alternative; you play online for free and get rated without spending a dime and you play at your own convenience too. Sounds great, right? So you do this, and instead you get so disappointed; players seem to be full of cheaters, ratings systems seem so iffy, and the moderators are eager to close players' accounts. You get so discouraged by the whole experience and you end it by writing a negative review and close the door behind you, but you never even knew what you were really dealing with.

Every time you went to an online chess club and offered a game, you quickly got a response from some other visitor eager to play a game, right? Wrong again! Online chess clubs such as Chess.com and Lichess.org and others are not there for the love of chess or chess players; they are there to make some money as you know. But the administrators of these websites have some serious problems running them. Visitors to the chess websites want to set games their way not someone else's way; they want to play when it is convenient for them, also visitors to these websites don't arrive at the same time in order to play. Programmers/ administrators are not chess players and cannot spend their time waiting for visitors or playing them, so they created a solution: use a group of chess addicts as ready players and moderators for the visitors.

So actually, you never even played any other visitor to these websites. You only played their so called moderators each and every time! The moderators only get to pick games offered by the visitors, but they have powers given to them by the website administrators. A moderator always get more clock time than you do as a visitor. He can cheat you by opening with a chess engine without suffering any consequences. But most importantly, a moderator can close your account. Now, if you are a talented chess player, you will get excellent rating from playing FIDE tournaments and maybe make some money too; something to feel proud of. But if you played so well on online websites against the moderators, you will only get your account shut down in a heart beat. See, moderators are losers. They play chess a lot since they are failures at life achievements. But they even suck at chess too, and when someone keeps beating them at the only vent that makes them feel intelligent, they retaliate by closing threatening accounts.

The rating system that these websites use is not the real Elo rating system used by FIDE that rate grand masters. It is the Glicko system that is riddled with problems, and as a player you must have experienced this junk system when you realized that you cannot rely on it to tell you the real strength of your opponents. But the worst part is the fact that talented chess players are quickly stopped in their track by the moderators who remain as the only permanent rated players. This is why the best online rated players by such websites do poorly when they try their luck playing real FIDE tournaments.

Now you must be wondering, tens of thousands of players logged to these websites cannot be wrong. After all, Chess.com claim that they have over a 100,000 players logged to their website at a time and Lichess have similar claims, yet you have the eerie feeling that you are playing the same people over and over. Actually, you are right this time! These numbers are totally fudged. In reality, these websites only get few visitors at a time wanting to play chess, and their games get picked up by the few website moderators who are the same cheaters you kept running into again and again. Bots are used to create the illusion of many games offered by visitors. But in the end, we get what we pay for; free online chess rating that is not worth the free bad feelings we get from it!

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.