ThomasCM

This is the first large-scale analysis of Grandmaster activity across Chess.com and Lichess from 2008 to 2025, based on years of data collection and millions of games. I explored which platform top chess players prefer and how Chess.com and Lichess have evolved over the years.

All data comes from my project ChessMonitor, which maintains one of the largest chess databases in the world. Feel free to check it out! :)

Chess.com Insights are similar to what my project is doing. However, Lichess has nothing similar. They do have something called "Chess Insights" but it's not really comparable IMHO.

That said, there are also some unique features like "Openings" which allows you to quickly identify your best/worst openings.

Both features are already on my TODO list. That doesn't mean they are coming soon, though... ;)

Thanks, I'll look into this!

That is where some of the inspiration came from. Years ago, I was an avid Dota player and always loved Dotabuff (and OpenDota, too).

I'm aware of Chess960, but this will probably never be supported on ChessMonitor for three reasons: First, Chess960 basically tries to prevent players from preparing (by having a random starting position) which does not align well with providing statistics. Second, it would require major UI and storage changes on ChessMonitor (like adding an option to select the starting position to compare games). And third, Chess960 is simply not as popular amongst non-professional chess players.

Thanks, I just like it when all state is in the URL and you can just bookmark it. Also using the browser back/forward button should work well thanks to that. I'll check out your library!

My code for that is rather simple. I'm using Next.js and the code looks something like this (a little simplified):

  const router = useRouter(); // get the router/location object
  const information = useFetch({ position: router.query.position }); // fetch information from the server
  
  function changeChessPosition(newPosition) { // called when position changes
      router.replace({ query: { postition: newPosition } }); // replaces the state in the URL
  }

In addition, I have some caching in place so that each position is only downloaded once and the change function looks a little more complicated in my case as there are multiple values that can be change for each page.

I'm currently not doing Stockfish evaluations (everything is based on simple win/loss-rate) but I hope I'm able to integrate this in the future. Then I can show much more in-depth statistics like the one you mention.

Hi everyone, author here. Please let me know if you have feedback or questions.

Yes, in contrast to storing the board (which can be a fixed size), this depends on the length of the game of course.

That said, there are some optimizations you can apply that will compress moves even further (for example the order of the moves as explained in the Lichess blog post is important). In the end it's a tradeoff between (de)serializing the game fast and reducing the size (even more).