I’ve written about playing chess with a regular partner and about playing with strangers, but there is another option: playing against the computer. The two major platforms, lichess and chess.com, offer this choice. Here I describe my experiences playing against both and compare their features. But please don’t misconstrue this comparison as a recommendation to use one in preference to the other. Chess.com is a commercial product, while lichess is free, open source, and nonprofit. Chess.com does have a no-cost option, which one could, perhaps, compare with lichess more fairly, but the free version of chess.com strictly limits the number of times in a day that you can do most activities (game analysis, puzzles, lessons), and so I don’t think it makes sense as a tool for serious learners.
Not surprisingly, then, chess.com’s play-against-the-computer feature has many more bells and whistles than does that of lichess. These are apparent from the outset, when you choose your opponent. Chess.com has dozens of bots, complete with names, pictures, nationalities, chess playing styles, and ratings. At the top of this post you see Zara, a Malaysian female rated 850 who “loves to play creative chess games and come up with her own ideas. Be careful or she’ll trick you with her unique tactics.” If you scroll down past the many bot pictures, you reach the more austere option of playing against the “engine.” The chess.com engine’s levels number from 1 to 25 and come with labels, from beginner (rated 250) to maximum (rated 3200). On lichess you can play against a bot named Maia or against its engine, which has 8 levels.
In addition to level of play, both platforms offer other options for customizing your game, including color (white, black, random) and time control. Chess.com offers many more options than these, however, and this is where playing against the computer can become an outstanding learning experience. You can select various types of assistance, including takebacks, warnings, and hints (to name just a few), or you can play in ”Challenge” mode, with no intervention. Options like takebacks and warnings were very useful to me at the beginning of my chess journey, when I was blundering and making mistakes that would have ended a game in short order had I not chosen to be warned and able to take back a move.
Chess players debate endlessly about what percentages of time they should give to the various aspects of their study of the game, such as playing, studying master games, doing puzzles, and so on. But all agree that an indispensable part of learning is analyzing each game you play, preferably right after you finish it. Both platforms incorporate this analysis ability into their play-against-the-computer option. The main difference in their functionalities is in presentation, with chess.com’s analysis being more immediately understandable and accessible. It breaks the game down into “key moments” and lets you choose to “retry” to find the best move, get a hint about it, or just display it. Lichess has a similar feature called “Learn from your mistakes,” but its presentation is not quite as user-friendly. In addition to this brief analysis of key points in the game, both platforms offer a much deeper, move-by-move analysis as well.
There is one huge difference between playing against the computer on chess.com and on lichess: even premium versions of chess.com do not save a record of the games you play against the computer, as they do in the case of your games against human opponents. Lichess saves both types of games, and you can go back as often as you like to analyze them and slice and dice them in a multitude of ways. But if you play against chess.com and exit the game without using the analysis feature then and there, it is gone for good, and you have learned nothing. But you can do a workaround in lichess to address chess.com’s failure to save the games played against its computer. Before exiting your chess.com game, you have a “Share” option, which you can use to make a copy of the game in the chess computer notation format called “pgn.” Lichess lets you import the game in that format (this takes a little tweaking), save it, and do all of the same analysis activities that you can do on games played originally in lichess.
But how does it feel to play chess against a computer rather than a human being? I find that it is less anxiety-producing than playing with a random stranger. Even though I know that I will likely never encounter that random stranger again—and can even block them if need be—the fact that they are a real person adds an edge to the experience. This means that when I sit down to play without a partner and have to decide whether to play against the computer or against a random stranger, playing with the computer feels like the easier, but more cowardly, option. Is this how it feels to others, I wonder?
Recommendation of the Week: On his Perpetual Chess podcast, Ben Johnson interviewed Stuart Margulies, one of the coauthors of the classic book Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess. Don’t miss this unique conversation, which provides a fascinating glimpse into the chess world as this bestselling volume was being created.
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