Most people reading this will know that the two most popular online chess platforms are lichess and chess.com. Lichess is entirely free, and thus is often used for group chess activities like tournaments so that there is no cost to participants. I like the lichess interface very much and play there frequently. Chess.com has a free version, but you need to pay a fee if you want certain features. I feel it’s worth it, but it’s not at all necessary if you already use lichess. The fact is that I subscribed to chess.com it because I thought its analysis feature was better than that of lichess, but that was largely a beginner’s mistaken impression. If you try them both you will see that the analysis on chess.com is much more straightforward and easy to follow; however, lichess tells you much more, if you give yourself time to learn the various ways it presents the analysis, and there are many YouTube videos that do just that. There are many online comparisons of the two main online platforms: here is one of the more balanced comparisons. As you browse, you will see that the fact that the two sites use different rating systems has spawned many gigabytes of online discussion, but I will save the topic of ratings for a future post.
Starting Chess at Age 63