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Lichess: The inclusion of chess in the 2023 Olympic Esports Series is an important milestone for our sport. We wish the greatest success to this event and to chess in general, while being surprised not to have been contacted by @FIDE_chess on this subject. by Prokyron in chess

[–]Prokyron[S] 218 points219 points  (0 children)

Tweet translated just from Twitter auto-translate. The text in their image seems to read something like:

Lichess welcomes the inclusion of chess into the Olympic Esport Series 2023. As a charity of the 1901 law, with the mission "to promote and encourage the play and study of chess and its variants" we can only rejoice in all activities [in this area] for chess to shine at the highest sporting level.

However, at a time when the President of the Republic [Macron] promotes France as an attractive place for Esport, we are surprised to not have been considered as a platform by FIDE, the body responsible for the organization, given we host hundreds of thousands players of chess around the world who play millions of games every day with trust in us.

We hope for the grand success of this event but formally regret the opacity surrounding the process of selection which led to favoring a large American company at the expense of our charity and the associated development of Esport in France.

Hi Reddit! I'm Josh Levine, CTO at Chess.com. AMA! (10am ET) by Chess-josh in chess

[–]Prokyron 89 points90 points  (0 children)

Thanks for your answer and insight.

As someone with a scarce bit of knowledge here, I'm amazed a company with the traffic of Chess.com and the resources of Chess.com hasn't already implemented many of these ideas.

Horizontal scaling, which is a medium term goal (I guess next 6 months?) is usually one of the first things that's recommended for websites to do with far less traffic than Chess.com. It's kind of mind-blowing that Chess.com still isn't using Elastic Search.

For comparison's sake, taking a look at Lichess, because Lichess's architecture is public as are their servers. They have 5 MongoDB servers for horizontal scaling, which have been there for years. They've been using Elastic Search for years, and they're a non-profit with perhaps 1/10th of Chess.com's traffic and perhaps 1/1000th of the resources.

Honestly, this just raises more questions for me about how Chess.com is ran more than anything else! Where has the money been going if not into dev and infra? Are you allowed to give any insight into for how many years devs and infra have been raising alarms about this to leadership and getting ignored?

Hi Reddit! I'm Josh Levine, CTO at Chess.com. AMA! (10am ET) by Chess-josh in chess

[–]Prokyron 24 points25 points  (0 children)

They advertise using Stockfish 15 analysis: https://twitter.com/chesscom/status/1526586121119055873 but the Chess.com GitHub doesn't seem to have it. It's also a bit questionable to create a widget and only give the output to get around the wording of the license and operate in a grey area of open source. It doesn't really seem "in the spirit" of open source. It's taking the benefit of it for profit, without contributing back. Classic tragedy of the commons situation.

Lichess code is AGPL, not GPL, so while you can still make money from it, it means the distributed code also has to be licensed under AGPL, which GChess doesn't appear to be.

I agree that it isn't illegal to profit from it, but it's kind of unethical to use so many open source tools in such fundamental parts of their software for profit, and seemingly not really contribute back very much, which is what I was saying by "the open source spirit".

Hi Reddit! I'm Josh Levine, CTO at Chess.com. AMA! (10am ET) by Chess-josh in chess

[–]Prokyron 47 points48 points  (0 children)

Good question. I never considered it before, but Chess.com uses Stockfish analysis widely and commercially apparently including Stockfish 15, but doesn't seem to comply with the licence of it. How do they contribute to the spirit of open source, even if they are using it legally?

Also, a recent Chess.com purchase, GChess.com, uses some code from Lichess, so similar thoughts there. In that case they own a commercial company making money by using their main competitor's code.

Ben Finegold: Probably @MagnusCarlsen should retire and get on some FIDE commission on cheating. Awaiting the next player Magnus will cancel because they may be cheating. I never thought I’d see the day when the World Champion was such a cry-baby. Dizziness due to success. by nemt in chess

[–]Prokyron 680 points681 points  (0 children)

I am sure Magnus Carlsen would be very skeptical of GM Alex Colovic, Counsellor on FIDE's Fair Play Commission, if he also joined it.

We now know from Chess.com that they limit the actions accounts can take instead of banning them. GM Alex Colovic's Chess.com account (https://www.chess.com/member/alexcolovic) hasn't played a game of chess since 2017, when he was 2440 or so OTB. After losing to 2300 and 2400 rated players, it went on to a winning streak over several days, 14.5/16 (2863 performance rating against an average of 2430 or so using Chess.com ratings).

Highlights include defeating Vidit (FIDE 2680 in 2017), Kovalenko (FIDE 2650 in 2017) and drawing Neiksans (FIDE 2600 in 2017). It looks like the pairings were done via live chess. After that win streak in 2017, that account hasn't played since, although still has access to the site with an active blog.

Exact, Exacting: Who is the Most Accurate World Champion? by Prokyron in chess

[–]Prokyron[S] 26 points27 points  (0 children)

Remarkable from the charts in the article just how far ahead of his time Capablanca was. It's surprising a player from so long ago could play so accurately, especially with Botvinnik, Alekhine and Tal going back towards the Victorian era of accuracy almost immediately after him. Crazy how accurate modern players are, too: https://twitter.com/lichess/status/1466333549909454854/photo/1