Lichess vs chess.com

Dina Belenkaya interview, Ben Finegold, 6/15/2025

"Umm ... Vladimir Kramnik. And his fight against cheating. Do you think he's doing the right thing?"

"I don't know why he cares about cheating online. People cheat online. They get caught. They don't get caught. He came to the conclusion that everybody's cheating. So that ruins his argument... when he just accuses everybody, 'cause it's just silly. So yeah, he's obviously lost his mind. I'm the only person that tells Kramnic he's insane that he doesn't block. And I said, 'He hasn't blocked me 'cause I'm a grandmaster.' And he said, 'No, I haven't blocked you 'cause you haven't made it personal.' And I'm like, 'What? I've made it more personal than anyone. I said, 'You've lost your mind.' And his response was, 'At least I have a mind.' And my wife thought that was really funny, so she laughed at that. But yeah, I used to complain to Kramnik a lot about his crazy ideas and then I said like, 'Well, I'm done.' 'Cause he just keeps tweeting, 'everybody's cheating, everybody's cheating'. So that's, you know, now obviously if three people are cheating out of a hundred and you accuse 90 of them, then the three people get caught. Kramnic's like, 'See, I said that guy cheated.' Well, you said 87 other people cheated too and they didn't. I mean, he's gone overboard."

"What about his eternal battle against the chess mafia?"

"The chess mafia will never defeat them! Yeah. I don't know what that's all about... although I like the term 'chess mafia'."

I use both and with different intensions. If I wanna play bullet or blitz I would choose Lichess. And if I wanna play Rapid and onward I would use both. And if I wanna play 4 player varients I would choose chess.com. And of course if I wanna ask something or chat I would choose chess.com. Because chess.com needs more network bandwith and lichess does not. I mean for me, sometimes it suddenly gets disconnected in chess.com more frequently than lichess. And chess.com needs more time to load if my connection is a little slow, but it is enough to load lichess anyway. So, for me both platforms are equally important depending on my intension.

I started with Lichess and I'm still a member though I only play here now... only Rapid (15/10) and Daily.

I still go there sometimes to study. I really like their Interactive Lessons feature.

I've consistently stated that I saw cheating in blitz, and that's why I don't play blitz on Chess.com. I never said 'everywhere'. You are like to make an argument when there isn't one.

#107 I think you have found a good solution.

@martied,

And people cheat less in rapid? In bullet? On other sites? Or is this consistent cheating constant? Intermittent? Why can’t you just report these people you feel are suspicious and move on with you life?

Amen, it's like they're stuck in this paranoia that takes half the fun out of it...

and want to... share the joy, I guess

I reported a sandbagger yesterday, and today I got a message for a rating refund and noticed their account is now closed

Most think cheating is about the same, percentage wise but if you wanted to make a case, stats aside:

if you cheat, you're much more likely to get caught here... Chess.com has the best cheat detection in history, bar none

Bullet is more difficult to cheat vs. blitz, with longer games it's more obvious that cheating is involved. Generally reporting is useless especially if they are paid members. I prefer to block people but since I play only bullet cheating is usually not noticeable and I 100% block certain countries so sandbagging/cheating/stalling etc are rarely a problem for me now. I'm looking forward to a reply from you as I'm sure it will be as retarded as your other posts.

Generally reporting is unnecessary because their cheat detection methods are so good now that they pick up the obvious cases relatively quickly - like, less than 24 hours - and because people are usually terrible at reporting the subtle cheaters and instead flood the reporting system with a lot of false reports ie. they believe it's cheating but it's not. Premium membership has nothing to do with it - if they're a titled player there's additional human review before action.

Because there's always been so much misinformation about cheating, discussion about it in the public forums isn't allowed and such threads get locked. You can talk about it in the cheating forum if you'd like to learn what cheating really looks like and understand the history of cheat detection on here - those folks used to catch cheaters and report them to chess.com and nowadays they don't have to do that anywhere nearly as much.

#117 One of the most naive, if not the most retarded post I've read on Chess.com. A simple read of the Hans Nieman scandal lays bare the so-called super duper cheat detection methods. Jeez, get your head out.

#119 Correct.

hi

This has gone off topic now and discussions about this isn't for the general forums 

Thanks