Your donations and support have allowed us to do many awesome things this half-year that we hope you will enjoy. We will continue to work hard to give you the best free, libre, and open-source chess experience, and that is only possible because of the chess community’s trust in Lichess. We are excited to announce work on a lot of different areas of Lichess, so read on to see how we have changed for the better!
If you want to find out more about what we’ve done since January, you can find our (rather lengthy!) changelog here.
Announcing: Part-Time Developer + Development Curator
Part-Time Developer
From our earliest days, we’ve relied on loose and informal help from volunteer developers to build and maintain our platform and tools. Contributors from around the world added features, fixed bugs, and expanded the sophistication of what we have in our technological arsenal. Over time, Lichess has become dependent not just on the core platform (lila) but many functions and tools which are off-lila as well.
To continue to develop and maintain these off-lila tools, we have hired a part-time developer, @rook_the_cook, who started on June 1 and will be helping us out for 20 hours per week. Ben has previously worked in EdTech and has been a regular contributor to Lichess, spearheading a variety of projects and involving himself in countless developer discussions. Ben is happy to have rolled out our payment portal, an in-house payment system that was built for extensibility and will also serve tournament prize winners to claim their prizes. It will be trialed over the next couple of months with selected tournament winners, and Ben’s work in quickly developing this tool has been greatly appreciated by the team at Lichess. Ben is now looking to focus his work on moderation tools, so we are ecstatic to see what the future will bring with Ben’s excellent work!
Development Curator
As Lichess has grown, so have the ideas. Across Zulip, social media, forum posts, GitHub comments, and everything in between, grassroots ideation has always been a strength of Lichess. As we’ve grown, though, it’s also introduced challenges. Ideas sometimes get lost, tickets uncategorized, and discussions can stall without a clear way to move forward. We’ve grown to a point where we need dedicated support to keep our development organised and accessible.
Historically, our developers have balanced both coding and community ideation, but as we’ve grown, the need for a dedicated role to curate and bridge ideas into action has become clear.
Enter our development curator. Our development curator, who works part-time currently, has been carefully bridging the gap between the developer team and the non-developers, refining developer initiatives and making sure that Lichess as a whole is working cohesively toward the same vision. After taking on different types of work aimed at improving admin and moderation tooling, the development curator will now focus on doing more in terms of aggregating and using user feedback in the 2nd half of the year.
Mobile Updates
With over 7500 commits, we are hard at work improving our new app and have also officially discontinued support for our old app. @veloce started working on the app more than three years ago and released the beta version of the new app just two years ago. In this time, the app has seen tremendous improvements and tweaks, culminating in a staggering project that can only be truly appreciated as your pour over the source code. With the app’s official release, we continue to urge users to make the switch, having not only fixed the reasons to stay on the old app, but also having made vast developments in achieving feature parity with the website. We list some of the most notable changes below:
- We have introduced a broadcast widget, allowing you to follow and be notified of your favorite tournaments directly on your mobile homepage. Available for both Android and iOS.
- Just like on the website, the friends list on the homepage is now available.
- You can now challenge a friend with a link.
- Faster game screen: board and game performance has been greatly improved
- Configurable home time controls are now available.
- Better team broadcasts support (in preparation for the FIDE Olympiad!)
- A lot of bug fixes, performance, and usability improvements
The broadcast widget
Site Updates
Our developers work tirelessly to improve Lichess and maintain its many features. Coding is a collaborative process, and being an open source project, Lichess is greatly indebted to the work of countless developers who maintain the codebase, manage updates, and fix bugs. If you’re interested in contributing to the behind-the-scenes Lichess operation, join us on Discord and read our contribute page for more information.
Some of our most important and significant changes include:
Piece maneuver arrows for top engine lines
… and many more!
… and, of course, the knight’s new eyes!
Broadcasts
We remain steadfast in broadcasting as many events as possible, and we hope that the following sample of broadcasts will help showcase the wide range of events we have already covered:
As well as countless continental and national championships, and much more!
Broadcast Changes
Broadcasts have continued to improve, allowing you to watch hundreds of broadcasts a month in a seamless, fine-tuned experience.
Some of our most important and significant broadcast changes include:
For spectators:
Team leaderboard (German Bundesliga)
For organizers:
- Unique viewers per round stats, giving you the option to see how many viewers your event has
- Easier grouping of broadcasts, thanks to a drag-and-drop UI and auto-filled tournament suggestions
Broadcast grouping UI
… and many more!
Blogs
The blogging landscape is being revamped, with changes coming soon to our AI first-pass tool as well as human curator actions and general internal blogging assessment tools. We are grateful to have so many authors writing consistently great blog posts, and we hope to better serve the needs of the community by promoting more well-written, creative, and solely human-generated blog posts.
Op1 – Partial 8-piece tablebase available
Partial 8-piece tablebases are now available on Lichess, right on the analysis board as well as for download (63 TiB).
Viswanathan Anand Interview with Lichess
Lichess interviewed legendary world champion GM Viswanathan Anand, who reflected on his career, the evolution of the game, and much more.
GM Viswanathan Anand
Events
The interconnected web between online and offline chess always gets Lichess’ focus, so we have continued to cover all kinds of chess events.
FIDE Candidates 2026
Lichess was there to cover one of the most anticipated tournaments of 2026, the FIDE Candidates, which allows one player the opportunity to challenge reigning world champion GM Gukesh D. You can find the start of our written coverage here, and don’t forget to check out our extensive library of Candidates interviews here!
FIDE World Team Rapid & Blitz Chess Championships 2026
Lichess also covered the FIDE World Team Rapid & Blitz Chess Championships 2026, producing written coverage and on-site interviews.
Tata Steel
Lichess provided written coverage of Tata Steel Chess 2026, as well as on-site interviews with the players. You can find the written coverage here: 1 2 3 4 5.
GM Javokhir Sindarov is the world championship challenger; photo: Niki Riga / FIDE, FIDE Candidates 2026
Event Collaborations
Lichess also closely collaborates with online and offline chess events to provide support and bring our community fun tournaments that they can enjoy. If you are a tournament organizer and are interested in collaborating with Lichess, email us at events@lichess.org.
Bled Chess Festival
Lichess and the Bled Chess Festival collaborated to bring chess enthusiasts worldwide the opportunity to qualify for accommodation packages (worth $8,000 in total) for the Bled Chess Festival, hosted in the beautiful lakeside town of Bled.
ChessMood
For the second year in a row, Lichess has continued its collaboration with ChessMood to host the ChessMood 20/20 Grand Prix, which sees one qualifier tournament every 20th of each month, and rounds off the year with a final on December 20. The next qualifying arena will be held on the 20th of August; you can sign up by emailing events@lichess.org.
Queens’ Online Chess Festival
The Queens’ Online Chess Festival 2026 is a series of continental women’s online blitz tournaments dedicated to International Women’s Day (8 March). Lichess was pleased to partner with the FIDE Commission for Women’s Chess to bring you this event, which saw the participation of more than 100 girls and women.
Lichess Events
We are also proud to bring you our own Lichess events, which continue to receive increased attention and support. We work diligently on improving these events to bring a competitive and fun spirit to our beloved community.
Titled Arena
A fixture of Lichess events, the Titled Arena continues to pit the strongest players in the world against each other twice a month. Don’t miss the next titled arena!
Streamer Arena
The Streamer Arena celebrates its sixth year and continues to engage Lichess streamers and their communities. Our next arena is in just over a week!
Game of the Month
Our game of the month competition continues to grow thanks to the community’s amazing support. With over 100 games posted each month, our team takes careful consideration to judge these games and bring you the Lichess GOTM. Check the General Chess Discussion subforum at the start of the month for the stickied post where you can submit your own brilliant games!
Lichess Bundesliga
After more than six years of tournaments, the two-time weekly Lichess Bundesliga has recently crossed its 672nd edition. With over 18 leagues alongside their various divisions, the Lichess Bundesliga remains one of our site’s biggest and most exciting tournaments.
Lichess Rapid & Bullet Leagues
In late 2025, we announced the introduction of two new leagues: the Lichess Rapid and Bullet Team Leagues! Join us for the 204th Lichess Rapid League 1 Team Battle, as well as the Lichess Bullet League 41A Team Battle and Lichess Bullet League 41B Team Battle.
The Lichess Bullet and Rapid Team Leagues
Lichess Mega Battle
The Lichess Mega Battle, which is running its 146th edition next week, runs every second Friday and frequently welcomes around 2000 players.
Variant World Championships
Lichess continues to support variant communities by collaborating with them to host world championships in all of the variants Lichess offers, excluding chess960. So far, the following world championships are under way:
Atomic World Championship
Racing Kings World Championship
With more coming along the way in the latter half of 2026!
Moderation
We continue to work on fine-tuning our moderation algorithms and human input, bringing you a safer and more enjoyable site experience. We have improved our cheat detection algorithms and improved several of our cheat-related moderation policies, catching more methods and types of cheating. Similarly, we have worked to introduce AI to aid us in moderating communications, giving us a first pass of reports before human review. We have also recruited more moderators to help us out in different areas, including cheat detection and communications, increasing our number of active moderators to the highest number Lichess has ever seen.
Chess Openings
What do the Pfrang Gambit, Schuehler Gambit, Barcza Variation, Keres-Parma System, and the Gunsberg Variation, Provincial Opening have in common? Chess-wise, not much, but they were all recently merged and added to our opening explorer thanks to our tireless opening contributors. If you feel like your favorite opening variations are missing, please let us know on Github! We regularly add openings, and have added a lot of openings since the beginning of the year.
Homepage Event Link Changes
Some may have noticed that hourly tournaments no longer have a homepage button. This change is part of a larger overhaul to reduce the number of homepage event / tournament buttons, making sure that only the most important tournaments and events are shown to our users. We are currently in the advanced stages of modifying our policies regarding the duration and nature of tournaments displayed on the homepage.
Research
We are delighted to announce that we now have a dedicated research hub, where we work on adding papers that utilize Lichess or Lichess data, as well as general research outreach with all of the wonderful, brilliant chess researchers of today. We also now have an e-mail, research@lichess.org, which you, whether you’re a researcher or a curious mind, can use to contact us for all research-related reasons.
Translation
A plethora of language translations have been added/updated thanks to our many CrowdIn contributors. Dozens of object classes were made translateable, including automated messages for the first time. Furthermore, there were 100+ improvements to existing strings using years of cumulative feedback and painstaking review.
Here are some people who deserve a shoutout for their immense hard work:
- Bilolbek Normuminov for getting Uzbek much, much further with 2000+ strings translated and thoughtful suggestions on specific strings
- bone NI (bounkirdni) for taking Lao translation (
lo-LA) from almost untranslated to 75%+ completion - Hyphasis12 for work on Marathi
- Bedirxan Hessin for work on Kurmanji Kurdish
- João Nuno Valente for bringing European Portuguese up to 100%
Internal
Content recruiting
We are happy to say that our call for action has helped us develop a vibrant content team which has been the life force behind our tournament coverage and regular social media posts. If you’d like to join the hundreds of volunteers helping Lichess, our Content & Social Media Team is currently looking for help. Read more and apply!
Conclusion
Lichess continues to steadily improve and prove that community-driven efforts are not only viable, but can also thrive in an anti-competitive environment. We will continue working diligently in the second half of 2026, for we are privileged to bring forth and maintain this labor of passion. We once again thank our users and contributors alike for believing in Lichess and helping it be the site that it always strives to be. Remember: free, libre, and open source. Now and forever.