lichess.org
Donate

Skill Level Of Lichess Player Pool

Where do you think the player pool here stacks up compared to places like Chess.com and ICC? Is it commonly accepted that the games are tougher here, even at lower ratings, than they are on Chess.com/? How about compared to ICC and it's famous blitz pools? How do they stack up compared to top blitz players here? What about classical?

Thanks
I believe that percentage-wise, there are bad and good players in equal measures at every place.
I've found that given the same rating, chess.com's blitz & bullet pool is much tougher in comparison. No clue about ICC, though I'd assume it's similar to chess.com.
@Nocturnal420

Some time ago I got a membership gift for ICC from 2 friends. I played there hours of blitz and got to play FMs, IMs and even GMs (I got 1 win against a GM, several wins and draws against IMs and FMs). I didn't like to use ICC so much though.

On chess.com I never got to play against much higher rated players.

On Fics I've played against FMs and CMs, but not so often.
Usually there's no masters joining the tourneys there.

On Lichess I played against LMs and NMs and CMs a few times, as well against 2200+ blitz players.
Sometimes I play against 1500+ blitz players who play pretty good.

I'm quite happy with the strength of the opponents on Lichess, and especially the amount of different tourneys all the time is a blessing !
#3, I agree. I say this as a lichess mod who sometimes represents the site, but what follows is my personal opinion.

I honestly think that most sites do about the same job when it come to community. It's only on the two extremes that there are differences.

Namely, we don't have the rock-bottom of chess players. Part of this is due to SEO, but more due to design. This is a no-nonsense chess site -- you are immediately shown a list of games you can join (without a join button or anything -- but an online gamer for instance would immediately understand the UI), and the registration screen requires you to do a mate in one puzzle -- so you must know the rules.

Chess.com by comparison (as an example) is open to all. There have never been more than 300 players below a rating 800 -- it was around 200 two years ago. I reckon ICC suffers quite a bit when it comes to the low end, but again, there is a healthy supply of 1500s at the very least. But there are probably less blow that as a proportion compared to other services.

We also don't have many players at top level. There's a few GMs and IMs, but there are no 'super GMs' -- yet.

We are going to get more GMs with time, though, for sure, whereas attracting wood pushers requires fundamental design changes. One of which was pushed just last night: github.com/ornicar/lila/issues/885

The two extremes aside, I think EVERY notable chess service -- chesscom, ICC, ChessCube, playchess, chess24 (though that's more about watching than playing)... they all provide a good range in my opinion.
We've had this discussion before and someone did some study and their results said that Lichess's ratings are inflated, which means that most people's ELO would be lower if they were on chess.com or something. I think it was 100-200 points or so, which is a lot.
That's not to say this site isn't just as good. In fact, the reason the ELO is inflated is probably because more beginners play here since it's a more user-friendly site.
@ #7: And yet in the end, you can do so much more here on Lichess than you can actually do on Chess.com. Chess.com has a lot of stuff seemingly "going on", but when you break it all down, sites like Lichess and ICC are light years ahead technically.
#8
Yeah, I don't mind having an inflated ELO in exchange for the site's quality. I just keep in mind that I'm not as good as the site says I am and that's that. No complaining here.
@#7 and #9, you're not really meant to compare them in the first place because for one, Lichess uses Glicko-2, not Elo. :D

Off-topic: glorious mate in the CAPTCHA by Stockfish lv 7 http://i.imgur.com/85Ntbhd.png

This topic has been archived and can no longer be replied to.