Chess.com vs. Lichess: Who's better?

Chess: a game that manages to be more strategic and complex than any other strategic game or math equation, simply with alternated-color squares on a square and 6 (Thank you @RuyLopez1000) types of pieces on both the White and Black side. Chess manages to be more artistic and creative than all paintings, with its tricky patterns and combinations. With chess, you'll never know what position might spring up, what pattern would arise from the depths of the underworld to present itself on the 64 squares. Chess is a beautiful and chaotic representation of war, stopping at no costs to capture the king, the ultimate motive of the sport.

Entirely for the love of the game, more and more people started devoting "tokens" of appreciation for their love of the game, with chess variants like Chess960 (invented by Bobby Fischer), where the aim is to still capture the king, but you never know what kind of starting position you'll be in. By appreciating the beauty of chess, these groups themselves invented a different type of beauty from the same game.

And in this article, you'll dive into another different type of beauty: online chess.

Part 1: Birth

Picture this: it's 2005, and you're young undergraduate Erik Allebest. You're addicted to chess, and I mean ADDICTED. During your lectures at Brigham Young University, you dream of the Dutch, picture the Pirc, and imagine the Italian (I mean hey, who cares about that dumb old bio lecture anyway?). You want people who feel the same way about chess as you do to have a better chess website for them. The current websites are too mechanical and soulless to even be considered in the same SENTENCE as a chess website. No, the chess website you envision has EVERYTHING a chess player could quite possibly imagine: a safe and fun environment, friendships with other players, saving your own chess games, and sharing ideas to learn from each other. But you can’t do this on your own, as no matter how big your dream is, if you don't work for it, you don't get it (sorry, fate doesn't choose favorites). Then, you get an idea! If you need a partner in crime that's as addicted to chess as you are (maybe even more...), then who does it better than the chess club president?

You talk to Jarom "Jay" Severson, and he's as enthusiastic as you are. You buy the domain name Chess.com and revamp it and launch it 2 years later in 2007. After heavy promotion of the website, you notice the numbers going up at a staggering rate. Life is good, and your domain is the number one chess platform, holding some of the best chess players on the planet. I mean, what could happen next?

When you and Jay launched Chess.com, it seemed like no one would even bother trying to compete with your domain. But one man had the courage to do it.

Part 2: Competition
I'm going to switch the scenes now. You're now in the shoes of Thibault Duplessis, a French programmer that has the guts to compete with the giant of a chess industry, at the absolute peak of the website at the time. You just finished the code of your brand new chess domain, Lichess. You came up with the name to symbolize the libre of the domain, as you notice your competitor has plastered ads over the screen, and the only way to be rid of these annoyances is to pay a membership to remove them, along with other "perks" that people that use Chess.com for free don't have (like unlimited amounts of game review, whereas free members only get 1 game review per day). Due to your utter respect for the game, you don't focus on profit and instead make your domain as free and accessible as possible, surviving off of donations from other passionate people like yourself. Pretty soon, your domain becomes a success, with people praising the lack of ads and its accessibility for new players. You feel proud of yourself, as your website that started from the bottom is now competing with one of the biggest chess websites in the world.

The question now is, which website does it better?

Part 3: Who's Better?

After a brief history lesson on your favorite chess websites, it's time to see who deserves to be crowned the better website:

Chess.com
My personal opinion on Chess.com is that it's slightly overrated. I mean, sure, you got a much better feel with the chess board and pieces, but at the end of the day, I don't think the monthly visitors between Chess.com and Lichess should be much higher than the other.
Some pros for Chess.com would definitely be the learning experience, as it has multiple tools for learning chess, such as the Lessons feature, which teaches different tactics, puzzles, and even helps with psychological aspects of chess. And with their new Puzzles update, completing puzzles feels more rewarding than on Lichess. Another pro for Chess.com is that the rating system is more practical for your skill range, as even if you purposefully sign up on a much higher rating than your actual rating, it will drop if you play. On the other hand...
The ads speak for themselves.

An OBVIOUS con that sticks out like a sore thumb, there are multiple ads like these that I have run into, even ones that promote gambling. I feel that Chess.com's advertising system has little to no checks, letting ads like these stay up on their platform. As long as this problem becomes resolved sooner rather than later, it would greatly benefit people that play on Chess.com and the domain itself. Not only that, but I feel that the cheating detection system could be significantly improved, as it takes at least a few reports to block a single cheater. And if one gets banned, then a hundred more will infiltrate the playing field. So, in conclusion for Chess.com, it has a lot of great learning possibilities and has a lot of accessibility with playing games, but is brought down heavily by its cons.

Lichess
Personally, I prefer Lichess out of the two, because of the lack of ads and how smooth the interface is, but for playing games I usually play on Chess.com. The pros for Lichess is the better interface, the accessibility for stronger players, and the lack of restrictions with other features (Puzzle Storm, Puzzle Racer, etc.). I would also say confidently that the system for catching cheaters is significantly better than Chess.com's, and catches way more cheaters that pop up and have stayed lurking in the playing field. Some cons for Lichess is for sure the rating system, as it is definitely way worse than Chess.com's, for the pure reason of inflation. The number of high rated players (i.e. 2000+) that have accounts prior to at least a few months old that I have had to play is much higher than it needs to be. You could make an argument that this also happens on Chess.com a fair amount, but I have encountered this much more on Lichess. Its learning systems are also very hard to access for people that have just started playing the game. So, in conclusion, Lichess is a safe haven for players with more experience, but can be quite patronizing for newer players.

A way you could take advantage of both chess websites at the same time is start learning on Chess.com when you're much newer at the game and then switch to Lichess when you're much better.

So who's better?
In reality, there is no definitive answer to the question, as both websites have a specific con that is holding them back, and both websites have different kinds of target audiences. So comparing the two would be like comparing apples and oranges. In other words, it's entirely up to you to decide which chess website you prefer better. In my opinion, I prefer Lichess because of the reasons above.

Thank you for reading my blog, and remember to