chess .com vs lichess

Lichess would not let you have this conversation, it would quickly be locked, apparently this comparison is not allowed there. So much for free speech eh.

"you win more on lichess" - thats not my experience, generally I win about as often as I lose, thats what the rating system is all about isn't it?

Eh, that's just lichess in general - they seem to lock a thread by default once it's inactive for a period of time. You see plenty of the same type of thread, with the majority of comments supporting lichess, of course.

Easier for higher rated players to find games on Lichess. Also the servers stay up.

I doubt that is true - the player pool is larger here at pretty much all ratings levels (not sure what you mean by "higher rated" either).

It's not like the Chess.com servers are down for days and days. Or crash unexpectedly. Lichess has scheduled downtimes as well.

lichess.com

lichess.org not lichess.com

At any one time Lichess has about 1/2 to 2/3 the number of games running compared to chess.com. However the distribution of players is heavily skewed towards better players. This clear to anyone who has a stable rating on any identical time control: compare your percentile on the two sites. (For sure the ratings on the two sites is calibrated differently, which isn't relevant to my point). Because of the shape of a bell curve, all this means that there are more better players on Lichess.

On the second point, the servers do crash unexpectedly, I've seen this happen to at least two streamers mid-stream, and also my own games.

More like 10% of the games.

I play on both. Both offer me plenty of opponents. Even though I’m in the top 1% here and the top 10% there, there are ten times as many players rated higher than me here as there.

I think using both is mandatory. Lichess for studies and stuff. Games on both.

Lichess still better.

That does not make sense to me - even if the average player on lichess is better than the average player here at chess.com, it's the size of player pool at a given rating that matters when finding a game. It doesn't matter if there are proportionally more games at the lower ratings one site than the other, it's the raw number of games at your rating level that matters when you are looking for a game.

Do you watch streamers who play on lichess as well? Again, it's an argument from visibility, and the larger and more popular website is seen more often - how do you know there haven't been comparable crashes on the lichess servers? I don't recall any of my games here being interrupted by an unscheduled server crash in the 14 years I've been a member on the site - there have been times where I haven't played much chess, but I've never had the servers just crash. I wasn't playing much when both chess sites had that massive spike in membership due to lockdowns / the Queen's Gambit and I know that both sites reported server crashes due to the demand at the time, and both of them have scaled up their operations to better cope with that sort of spike since. I also know that Chess.com has done some other things tohat have been very successful at growing their membership base and I can see that would mean they would need to add more capacity more quickly, but that means they're doing well and attracting people to the game.

Here's an interesting fact: July 20th was World Chess Day where FIDE wanted more than 1 million games played, OTB and online, that met certain conditions https://www.fide.com/news/3127

Of the 7,284,970 games played, "Chess.com, including its ChessKid platform, contributed the largest number of eligible games, exceeding six million"

Even if lichess contributed most of the rest, that would be 1 million games: so only 1/6th as many as Chess.com

I get that this is a function of Chess.com caring more about this sort of thing and being more organised in this space, but it's a demonstration of the differences betwene the two operating models.

I feel like chess.com is better because you can play with many bots but the thing is lichess uses FIDE Rating so if you play on lichess then your lichess rating will be used in actual chess tournaments but on chess.com your rating can be 1000 and your lichess rating is like 100, then 100 will be your rating in the tournament.

But both are very good places to play on

Lichess ratings have nothing to do with FIDE ratings.

In my personal experience, lichess players are tougher. I can win games on lichess, but it is not easy. Whereas I have a smoother time on chess.com. I lose more than I win on lichess.

Chess.com

CHESS.COM!!!!

If that were true, sure. It's not, though.