Chastity’s Chess Website Review

I thought it would be good to do a post where I review the different sites, I play chess on regularly. I may need to update this list if I find more sites that are a fun experience for playing or learning chess. This post contains my top three recommended websites for serious chess players.

https://lichess.org/

Lichess is the best site for playing western chess and its variants. I’ve said it before and the reason I say it’s the best is because it has no ads and runs entirely on donations as an open-source project. But that’s not all. It also has great tutorials for teaching the game of chess. It also has an easier to use interface compared to chess.com in my opinion. It’s much easier to find the option to play variants against the computer or real people because there are fewer menus to navigate through.

https://playstrategy.org/

Play Strategy is a Lichess based site that also has chess but includes other games such as Shogi(Japanese Chess) and Xiangqi(Chinese Chess). It has plenty of other games that I don’t even know how to play such as Go and Othello. If someone is into a variety of board games it’s definitely a good site but few people know about it and therefore it is hard to find people to play with. However, it also has bots that you can play against in case there are no humans available to play a specific game you are interested in.

https://lishogi.org/

Lishogi is specifically dedicated to the game of Shogi which is known as Japanese Chess. The game is very similar to chess with a few new pieces and the drop rule which allows you to drop captured pieces back on the board that you have captured similarly to Crazyhouse Chess. There are a lot of players on this site and as would be expected, many of them are from Japan and are really good.

Conclusion

While there are many chess websites available, be wary of those that are full of ads and microtransactions. Playing chess should be free and no one needs to spend any money unless they are buying books or hiring a chess coach.

All recommendations in this post will of course require an internet connection because they are websites. I will make a separate post about chess programs that you can play when not connected to the internet (after you download them in the first place of course!).