How Lichess Became a Global Chess Powerhouse: Inside the Free, Open-Source Revolution

Theo Wait was studying at University College London in 2011 when he rediscovered chess. He had been taught the game by his grandfather, but he never really continued with it. Wait’s best friend at college, a Frenchman, sent him a link to play chess on a new French website he had come across. It was called Lichess.

Wait first played with his friend and then others on the site. He found Lichess cool. Some 14 years and a pandemic later, Lichess has become a lot cooler. Or hotter, if you look at the numbers, or the influence it has on the game of chess.

Everything you need

Lichess is free, open source, has no ads, and requires no registration. It lets millions from across the world, ranging from amateurs to World champions, play chess online, learn its intricacies, and watch live all the major tournaments, including the World Championship and the World Cup.

Lichess does all that with just three full-time workers. Wait is one of them. Founder Thibault Duplessis and mobile developer Vincent Velociter are the others. An army of volunteers from around the globe keeps the website running and growing, ensuring the game of chess is accessible to everyone, without ever having to pay a subscription fee. It operates with donations (averaging five Euros per contributor).

“I began volunteering my time by trying to translate the website into Russian, as I was a student of the language then,” Wait tells The Hindu at Arpora, Goa, during the World Cup, which he is covering for Lichess. “Around 2013, Thibault reached out to me and he said, ‘You know, would you like to be part of the team?’”

Wait could not have imagined at the time that he was going to be a part of something truly unique, in the internet and social spaces. Lichess is not just one of the world’s leading gaming websites, it is one of the most popular open source projects as well.

“Lichess is now one of the 200 or 300 biggest websites in the world by traffic,” says Wait, who works as the director of operations. “We have hundreds of millions of visits every month. We provide a completely free platform for anyone to play or learn chess. We have all of the learning materials that you need to learn how to play chess, given entirely for free. We have courses, we have studies. Anyone interested in chess can begin experimenting with it.”

How did it all begin?

“Lichess was born when Thibault, a very talented programmer, wanted to learn a new developing language called Scala,” says Wait. “So, to practise with this, he began creating a chess website, because it has lots of features which are very useful for programming.”

There were teething troubles, yes. “Thibault wasn’t a formal chess player and in the early Lichess, we didn’t get all the chess rules correctly,” recalls Wait. “For example, en passant didn’t exist, or you could castle through check. But those issues were fixed very early. He created a chat feature, using which people pointed out flaws.”

Now, people are talking about the important role Lichess plays in the growth of chess. Vidit Gujrathi, who was part of the Olympiad-winning Indian team, says he has great regard for the service Lichess offers the game. “Now its mobile application is much smoother and it is through Lichess that I follow tournaments,” he tells The Hindu over the phone. “I have a lot of respect for Thibault, who is running it with his passion.”

Ringing endorsements

The other day, Vidit, the current World No. 27, had posted on X: “Such an amazing open source work…” Anish Giri, the World No. 5 from the Netherlands, replied: “Absolutely.”

“Such endorsements matter to Lichess,” says Wait. “They motivate the team. There have been many top players who have found Lichess useful in many ways, including their preparation. Javokhir Sindarov, who has done well at the World Cup here, said he was using the Lichess features for his preparation, including opening. The world’s best players play on Lichess, though some of them may not be revealing their identities.”

Millions of games are played on Lichess every day. “I think it is about 3.5 million games a day, the rated ones that is; but if you take unrated games played against bots engines or the anonymous games, you’re looking at maybe around six-seven million,” says Wait. “Of course, the pandemic saw a huge spurt in the traffic. Just before COVID-19, we were averaging maybe around 50,000 people online at any given time, but that number tripled in 2020.”

Chess was, in fact, the only game that grew during the pandemic. The world chess governing body did well to take chess to more people by using several online tournaments, including an Online Chess Olympiad, in which India was declared the joint-winner with Russia (which had won the final but had to share the title after India successfully appealed against an internet outage).

Chess is a game most ideal for the internet. All you need is a mobile phone and decent connectivity to play an interesting game. And, of course, Lichess isn’t the only website out there for chess. There are the likes of chess.com and Chessbase (and its hugely popular Indian version).

Explosion: The number of rated games on Lichess has grown substantially since 2013. COVID-19 was a turning point, with the site seeing a huge spurt in the traffic since the pandemic.
| Photo Credit:
Lichess

Lichess wants to ensure that chess remains free and is not corporatised. “We are not for sale,” says Wait. “We have had lots of interest from many other people and some companies, including a big one back in 2016-2017. It is imperative that Lichess keeps going; I know many people cannot afford subscription fees. And nobody wants to see a monopoly.”

It is expensive to keep Lichess going. “It costs us around 720,000 US dollars a year to run Lichess,” he says. “That includes salaries and servers, moderators, content, and the prize-fund tournaments that we put out. And those tournaments are important, too. At the end of the day, it is very nice for titled players to have an opportunity to just earn some money, you know, playing chess as well.”

Financial support

Wait says most of the financial contributions come from North America and Europe. “That is not surprising, as there is a big disparity in wealth globally, right?” he points out. “If a company was interested in supporting us, we would definitely be open to a conversation. And, of course, one can contribute by volunteering, too.”

Lichess would like to do more in India, which is second only to Russia in terms of the number of followers. “I would really like to do more just within grassroots chess in India,” says Wait. “And we would like to work on getting chess into schools and education.”