How can I play chess on the internet?

There are two main online chess websites. You can create a free account on either of them to play games of any length – 3 minutes, 15 minutes, 2 hours, whatever you like!

• lichess.org has the smoothest playing interface and is 100% freely accessible. Lichess is renowned for being the best host of ‘bullet’ chess (where players have 1 minute to play an entire game) and are very proud of being not-for-profit.
• chess.com provides a lot of news and tournament coverage, and is in general the most popular and the most corporate. They have the widest range of features – some free, some paid – and host the largest number of high-level events.

Very few features are unique to one website, but each site adds its own flavour. Naturally you’ll learn best how they work by playing around and trying it out for yourself!

Playing a game on Lichess

I am most familiar with Lichess, so here I’ll give a step-by-step breakdown of how to start a game of chess on their website. It’s best to have Lichess open in another tab to follow along. First you will want to log in to your account or create one at lichess.org/signup. (Pro-tip: click the little gear icon in the top right corner and choose which Background you like best.)

You can then begin to ‘seek’ a game by clicking ‘Create a game’ on the front page of Lichess. This will start the process of sending out a challenge to be matched with another player. Leave the first two options that you see (Variant: Standard, and Time control: Real time) as they are.

The next two sliding bars determine how much time players will have for the game. As it indicates, the first one is how much time each player starts with (to my students I recommend 10 or 15 minutes) and the second is how much time gets added for each move you play, called ‘increment’ (I recommend 5 or 10 seconds).

A game that starts with 10 minutes and has 5 seconds increment we would call ’10 + 5′. For reference, in-person junior tournaments are usually something like ’25 + 5′ and serious adult tournaments are ’90 + 30′. In the ’10 + 5′ case, the game will not last longer than about 20 to 25 minutes even if both players use all their time, which is very similar to our chess club games. The biggest reason chess clocks are used is to make sure games don’t last too long. But very important to remember: if your time runs out, you’ll lose the game, so be careful!

Finally, it is always better to select ‘Rated’ than ‘Unrated’ because that way you will play people at your level, and also it is easier to tell if you’re becoming a better chess player over time (keep in mind that a new account usually takes at least 10 games to get close to your ‘true’ level). Rating range controls how strong your opponents will be and is something you can play with a little bit. (For more on ratings, see the ‘Chess Info‘ page.)

Click the middle button (the half white/half black king) to choose a random colour, the game will start automatically, and you can play!

During the game, there are two important buttons on the right side: clicking the hand icon is how to offer a draw, and clicking the flag is how to resign (give up) and move on. When the game ends you will also see the result on the right side. It may say ‘1-0’ (white wins), ‘0-1’ (black wins), or ‘1/2-1/2’ (draw) and will briefly say why (because of checkmate, or time, or anything). Then if you want, you can start another game.

Once again, it’s best to try it and see. I hope you enjoy!