In this post I’m going to explain a few of the more advanced features of lichess, something that my fellow chess improvers have requested. Familiarity with these will greatly enhance your use of lichess as a chess improvement tool.
As we know, studying the games you have played is crucial to your improvement, and lichess makes this possible by keeping a record of every game you play using it, whether against the lichess computer or against a human opponent. (By comparison, chess.com keeps a record of the games you play with people, but not those against the computer.) Lichess also lets you import and save the records of any games you have played without lichess–games played on other apps or even over the board, as long as you have the PGN record of the game. PGN, or portable game notation, is a standard plain-text format for recording chess games. In addition to the moves, it records other data related to the game, such as who played which color and how the game concluded. The PGN records of the games you have played on lichess and those of your imported games can be found under the Games tab in your Profile, which is reachable from the home page. The “Analysis Board” option (in the red circle below) appears when you click on any of the games listed there.
You may already be familiar with the analysis board tool, which provides a useful display of the game record with your and your opponent’s missteps highlighted. But you may not have noticed the hamburger menu that appears in the bottom right-hand corner after you choose the analysis board.
Clicking this menu reveals additional helpful tools. They are displayed at the top of the right column:
Here I will focus on two of them: “Continue from here” and “Study.” “Continue from here” gives you a chance to replay, from any point, any game that lichess has stored for you, regardless of where or with whom it was originally played. You first decide whether you want to continue it with the lichess computer or with a friend on lichess; then you indicate whether you want to play as black or white, under what time control, and whether or not the game is rated. If you choose to play against the lichess computer, you are able to specify which level to play against as well.
Being able to “Continue from here” with a lichess friend is especially useful for a situation in which I and my chess classmates often find ourselves. After our teacher has taught a segment of the lesson, we pair off to play games in lichess, but because these games are played under a very short time control to maximize teaching time, being able to revisit them in a more leisurely way can be very instructive. To do this, we simply use the “Continue from here” option to invite our classmate (or the computer or any friend in lichess) to revisit the game. Similarly, the weekly Casual Chess Cafe established by my chess teacher pairs people in lichess for fifteen-minute games, and we can revisit those games from any point using this function as well.
The “Study” feature is very robust. Here I will restrict my discussion of it to its use for annotating games, something that I discussed in a previous post. (For a very comprehensive guide to “Study,” see the website The School of Rook.) As before, you choose a saved game and select the Analysis Board option to access the hamburger menu. When you choose the “Study” option, a list of icons representing tools appears in a row right below the chessboard. The vertical arrow below points to the chat bubble, which opens a box where you can type your comment. Here, I have selected the first move of the game in the list as the one I would like to comment on.
The comment where it is input and where it appears:
I recommend using all caps for your comments for readability.
For maximum learning it is best to add your own comments first and then ask lichess for its analysis of the game, which you do by clicking on the graph icon that appears below the chessboard.
If the lichess analysis refers to a move that you have already commented on, it labels your comments with your username and its own as “lichess.”
The other two features available from that hamburger menu are “Flip board” and “Board editor.” “Flip board” does exactly what it says–it enables you to change the perspective from which the game is displayed from black to white or white to black. “Board editor” is extremely complex, and I haven’t even scratched its surface yet. But the things my teacher does with it look amazing.
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