Lichess: the best online chess gaming site in the universe.

1. A little bit of history. 

In case you, dear chess friend, have been living under a rock for the last 3 or 4 years, maybe you haven´t notice the great changes in the chess gaming scene. Let me start by writing some history, probably the first servers (around 1993) where based in the now ancient FICS (free internet chess server), it forked in a number of engines, most famous being the worldwide famous "ICC" (Internet chess club) that was the place everyone wanted to be in, almost every GM from the chess elite played there, even Kasparov, and famous legends arouse, perhaps the biggest is that history about none other than Bobby Fischer playing anonymously and crushing everyone playing the likes of 1. f3 and defeating venerable GM's to shame. Ok. that was between late nineties and late 2000's. Well, now the scene has been changing quickly with the advent of Chess.com, Chess24, Playchess from Chessbase etc. what have all these sites in common? they are all great if you are willing to pay for the whole gaming experience, like filtering players by rating, unblocking features etc. Some offer news, and articles, here i want to make an honorable mention for Chess.com, their articles are enormously interesting and well written, the staff includes experienced and young GMs such as Serper, Smith, Shankland etc. Personally i enjoy the articles by Gennady Serper a lot, his knowledge about the soviet school is priceless.

2. An unexpected newcomer enters the arena.

All the named playing site where struggling against each other for the last 5 years, but a light struck of the nothing, a French computer programming wizard named Thibault Duplessis wrote a chess server by the name of Lichess, what stands apart from other chess servers is the incredible amount of features, to mention them is subject for another article it better for you to see it by yourself.

3. The two main features that make it shine between others.

You now want to know why it's the best (for me and probably hundred of thousand more chess fans too).

a) The incredibly fast and smooth gaming experience. I have played hundreds of games in the all the above named servers and this is by far the cleanest, fastest, enjoyable, it can be hard to explain it in words but that´s all about "gaming experience" topic, the experience is pleasant.

b) It's free, i mean, FREE, you register and have access to all it's features, no ads, no tricks here.

3. The always tasty technical side: Scala, JVM all the way.

to be continued..