By Admin 
No sport is perhaps driven by computer technology and the internet as much as chess. Not surprising, then, that it was one man’s experiments in a new computer programming language that led to the birth of 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 it is also among the biggest success stories in open source. Somewhere between six and seven million games are played on Lichess on a day: 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 here on Friday with the first round of the semifinals, after a day’s rest.
“Big events like the World championship and the World Cup attract peak audiences to our site,” Theo Wait, Director of Operations, Lichess, told The Hindu. 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 staff (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.