well this is a bit disappointing....

i am not sure if many of you have seen the news but recently lichess has announced a post about chess.com being mad of hikaru and company playing and streaming the lichess titled arena which occurred on the 22nd of july where Grandmaster Minh Le won the event (@wonderfultime) and hikaru came in 2nd while bortnyk got 3rd place. the reasoning is of course understandable and this post before mods look at this IS NOT TO put the site at a bad light but rather to express my thoughts. i agree, chess.com has every right to not want people like hikaru and more to stream what they consider their rivals brand even though its a charity and aims at supporting chess alongside chess.com and many others. they have every reason at not allowing these streamers to play on a different platform but in my belief i feel like chess.com should tone it down and let these users be mainly chess.com streamers but extend some bonus permission letting them also stream on other platforms, after all the point is to enjoy streaming.

https://lichess.org/blog/Yt7x2BAAACkABlKS/a-first-time-grandmaster-titled-arena-winner-and-nakamuras-forbidden-platform

they did post about it and again i like the site, i am not mad and definitely not disappointed but i am a bit sad that we cant really enjoy people playing wherever they want. i understand the reasoning and once again agree with the sites decisions but i hope they can come to extend the partnership contracts in allowing them to stream on other platforms as well at least for limited time as i think this would be a very cool idea, allowing streamers to have more liberty anywhere.

congrats to the winners of the event, i didn't ever expect hikaru would join but that was fun!

jeez is it that bad for people to play on some other site? You know that one person doing something else is just so detrimental to your platform with MILLIONS OF PEOPLE

all of this just for the money...

drama with danny

also I am a little confused with the one comment in the lichess forum 

"True, Hikaru is a big reason some people like chess.com better than Lichess."

do people actually play here just cause hikaru does 

Chess.com is terrible about this stuff. They don't hate on lichess, they just try to make members think chess.com is the only chess site. 

i mean...... yeah many people come here cause hikaru popularizes the platform but the site is still awesome and its pretty good, i think its just many know he plays here so they want to join in order to maybe play in his viewer arenas or be able to challenge him somewhow specially 

damn

"but extend some bonus permission letting them also stream on other platforms" why do they need permission like what if they just stopped streaming on cc and streamed on lichess only

theres a problem, thats illegal cause of contracts and the only way would be permission or to somehow be allowed to cancel their contracts which can be a bit difficult to do right now

this is like when jpop idols stay a night with a male human being 

Hikaru is chess.com's golden boy. They better not upset him and just let him play on lichess occasionally. He literally plays on lichess maybe 3 times a year. Hikaru is a legend of the game and chess.com needs to understand its Hikaru who has all the leverage and they should be lucky to have him.

I mean Hikaru is literally on the front of the page when you login. I totally agree with you that you should be able to play wherever you like, but I can also understand why chess.com reacts this way.

He played and won that 1 bitcoin event on Lichess.

I wonder if he sold it when it was 3x what it is now.

If I am not mistaken, Hikaru has a contract with chess.com that effectively says when he is streaming chess, he does so exclusively on chess.com.  John Bartholomew had a similar stipulation so when Chessable was bought by Magnus (who has an ownership stake in chess24) they let him out of the contract.

It is understandable that they would be upset that he was in breach of contract.  Whether you think the contract is good or not is irrelevant.  Both parties signed it and would need to agree to change it, otherwise it is a breach.

Kind of like letting Michael Jordan wear addidas sometimes. Who knows what the contract between the site and player is.   I don't blame chess com at all, it's about time someone made chess profitable.  If Hikaru doesn't like it he needs to get out of the deal imo.   

hikaru to lichess masters be like "guess whos back, back again...."

I understand, that chesscom wants Hikaru to play on this site. It's perfectly normal to have this in the contract, if they pay him or whatever... When he plays "casually", or does puzzle rushes, or trains somebody, sure, he would use this site.

But not being able to join a tournament with a price fund somewhere else... That is just stupid.

Sure, the price money for Titled Arena is not that big, and maybe not even interesting for Hikaru, but it's fundamentally wrong. It's like if they did not allow him to play Candidates, because it was broadcast by Lichess as well, and also the live streams were held by other than chesscom people

the final part, cool