Unrated games as Black?

Hi everyone!

I want to practice playing as Black against other players in unrated games.

On Chess.com, I found an option that lets me do this, as shown in the picture, but I couldn't find a similar option on Lichess.

Is there a way to do this on Lichess?

There is not an option to choose your colour in lichess; there used to be one, but it was removed because there ended up being too much of a colour imbalance. You can choose your colour when challenging a friend or playing against the computer, though.

That’s sad. They could at least keep this option in unrated games, since those are just for practice and don’t affect rating. It makes no sense to deny players such a simple and useful feature. If the platform doesn’t meet the community’s needs, people will leave for one that does.

I agree that it would be nice to be able to choose one's colour in a casual game, but the feature was removed because people were abusing it. I still by far prefer lichess over other sites.

By the way, you can choose your colour when playing the Maia bots (maia1 is close to your rating), which are supposed to play similarly to humans.

You will get black roughly 50% of the time in unrated games. Treat the rest as part of your chess education.
If you're colour fixated, play reverse move orders eg 1 d3 d5 2 d4! or 1 a3 e5 2 e4!