With just a three-man core team, Lichess focusses on serving chess community, free of cost

No sport is perhaps driven by computer technology and the internet as much as chess.

Therefore, it is not surprising that one man’s experiments in a new computer programming language gave birth to a unique chess website that has gone on to serve Grandmasters as well as hobby players at no cost.

Lichess is one of the world’s leading gaming websites and among the biggest success stories in open source. Somewhere between six and seven million chess games are played on Lichess in a day, and the players include some of the world’s best.

It is also an excellent resource for study material. Even Grandmasters find it useful. Lichess is enjoying more traffic than usual these days because of the World Cup, which resumes at Resort Rio in Goa on Friday with the first round of the semifinals, after a day’s rest.

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“Big events like the World Championship and the World Cup attract peak audiences to our site,” Theo Wait, Director of Operations, Lichess, told Sportstar. He became the second full-time worker of the organisation, about a year after it was founded by the French programmer Thibault Duplessis in 2010.

There is only one more staffer (mobile developer Vincent Velociter). But they have a team of volunteers from across the world to support them.

“We need $ 720,000 per year to run Lichess, and we get it through donations, averaging about five Euros per person,” says Wait. “We want to keep Lichess completely free, and say no to ads as well. There have been offers to buy out Lichess, but we are not for sale. We value privacy, and one can use Lichess without registration.”

It is features like these that have helped Lichess make a difference to this fascinating game that was born in India 15 centuries ago.

Published on Nov 20, 2025