The Beeminder Lichess integration is officially launched! Lichess is basically the cool kids version of Chess.com. [1]
As yet more evidence of what huge nerds Beeminder users are, a chess playing website got voted up towards the top of our list of candidate autodata integrations. And not just voted up. Multiple people built their own tools to automatically get their chess stats into Beeminder. (In particular, Austin Ely’s GitHub repo and Robert Perce’s Bash script in the forum.) We take efforts like that as very strong votes for an official, built in autodata integration. Since Lichess also has a beautiful API, that put it over the top.
How does it work? You create a Lichess-playing Beeminder goal on a screen like this:
Yes, you have to specify a fraction if you want to commit to less than one game per day. The math all checks out though.
Also you can choose to beemind all games or only one kind of game:
- Blitz
- Bullet
- Correspondence
- Classical
- Rapid
- Puzzle
Global Thermonuclear War
Austin Ely recommends Rapid Chess (10-20 minutes) as better for learning and improving than Blitz or Bullet.
Wait, I’m a Lichess user new to Beeminder
Welcome aboard! You might want to check out our getting started guide in our Help Docs, and then get yourself signed up. Assuming you’re on board with the commitment device, paying-money-if-you-go-off-track bit, the beauty of an autodata integration is that you don’t normally need to interact with Beeminder once you’ve gone through the process above of setting up your commitment. Just play more chess when Beeminder yells at you and you’re good.
Ready to dive in?
Footnotes
[1] Here’s Robert Perce with more on Lichess vs Chess.com:
Lichess is an open-source nonprofit with no paywalled features. Chess.com is a for-profit company with a freemium model. On the free plan you get only limited analysis of games. The flip side is that Chess.com’s income stream means they can do a lot more sponsorship of tournaments, clubs, and players. They do a lot for the growth of chess. The marketing budget for Chess.com means they have a larger userbase as well.
Elo ratings are not directly comparable between the Lichess and Chess.com. Mid-range Elo is typically about 200 points higher on Lichess but it diverges widely on the ends.
I personally strongly prefer Lichess’s interface but both are good.
There’s a perception that Lichess has more cheaters because it’s free but that’s broadly unfounded. Playing is free everywhere, and bots don’t need computer analysis of their games.
And, yes, “the cool kids version of Chess.com” is how I think of it. 😎