Chess.com

Best Chess website and Discord Ever! Best Staff and Mods and Management. Really impressed overall and very happy to be a part of the community.

I find Chess.com to be a good overall value. They give you everything you need, to have in a chess website.

Very good but some times is automatically makes the opponent win in the middle of the match and now my Elo is very low

Chess.com is fraud. They closed out my account and did not even refund my money.
They did not even provide any reason for closure!

I love this chess website. It always has great staff members to help and they are always there to answer your questions. Great fun.

R2GM owner

Subscription isn't worth it at all, very bad customer service, there is better sites. They ban you for talking with your opponent.

Website is slow as hell, and playing on any device besides a PC on your home network is impossible. The mobile app is clunky and impossible to use, you often lose seconds of time due to the app lagging on a perfectly fine network, which in Bullet pretty much secures the victory for your opponent who is often playing on a PC anyways. Yes, playing on mobile does not prevent you from going against PC players who are able to premove many more moves ahead, have far greater agility with their large monitors and mice, etc.

My criticisms of this website do not end here, besides Chess.com's atrocious website and app networking, any feature beyond playing chess on it is blocked behind a paywall. Want to analyze your game? You can do so once a day without paying at least $5 a month, a plan that would still only grant you a limited number of features. Want to select the "Lessons" they keep shoving down your throat through various popups on their website? Same story. Want to get rid of ads? Again, pay or simply use an Adblock at least something Chess.com can't lock behind a paywall. Anything that legitimately sets Chess.com apart from your typical "Free Chess" app on the AppStore is locked behind a monthly paywall. Pay us or stay bad at chess due to distracting ads, an inability to analyze your games and terrible servers. Typical.

However, if you think you will actually be able to play using Chess.com's horrendous servers, you are also gravely mistaken. Just recently, they claimed to have "very high demand" and claim to be working on scaling their services. For an indefinite time, unless you pay for their "Diamond" membership which comes out to a whopping $12.50 if you pay per month for a full year, or otherwise *$20.99* per month, you will randomly be unable to play chess. Wonderful.

As an 1800 rated bullet player, and a 1600 rapid player, the lack of features offered for free, terrible service and overall atrocious website and app build quality makes for an abysmal experience. If you don't already depend on Chess.com, do not use it. Lichess is thousands of times better and all its features are offered for free.

Email recieved offering renewal discount. Link proved untrue. Multiple attempts for reason went unanswered.

I don't think that many people are cheating because there's no point in points. The site uses the Glicko Rating System. FIDE/USCF uses the Elo Rating System which isn't even remotely the same. My main issue was you're given a starting rating on signup based on how experienced you say you are. In less than a month I had to block almost 100 people for abandoning the game, intentionally letting the clock run out, stalling when their stats show them to be quite skilled.

I'm new and play like it yet I was consistently matched with people rated 400 to 1000. Frustrating and boring for both sides. Customer service is a complete joke. "My name is so and so and chess is my life! We see you've cancelled your membership. I'm here to help..." After I respond, I get a different rep. Ask a technical question? They refer you to outside sources. The CS reps clearly aren't chess players.

Your rating can go up or down simply because of bad net connections or people just walking away from a game. How is that fair or reasonable? I was rated over 300 but can't even beat the computer on the easiest possible setting! Really don't think people were cheating at least not in blitz because there's no reward for winning and you just get paired with more or less experienced players and other cheaters.

They fail to rate or match people according to true skill. I do believe people initially cheat when signing up by saying they're new when they aren't. From there they obliterate people and get a very high score with many wins. It only takes them so far though. Some reviews state their rating went down after not playing for awhile. The site says they do that because they cant evaluate you unless you play all the time. Seriously?

Neither Lichess nor Chess – Play and Learn, aka Chess.com, provide anything close to the service their public relations spin claims they provide. I have screenshots of vicious verbal abuse threatening violence from members of both chess app developers, sent well over 10 screenshots documenting all manner of cheating, game abandoning, delay tactics, and verbal abuse to Google (the attached screenshots are from Lichess, but similar experience comes through Chess.com). I also quoted Google's own policies for software app developers back to Google, documenting point by point the daily violations both companies were engaged in. Google did absolutely nothing but give me the run around for nearly a year. Conclusion? Big tech does exactly what it wants if it means profit, and ignores abuses of many kinds outright, then lies directly to the public with public relations statements that have no relation to their actual practices. Update: I now have solid evidence of Lichess deliberately hacking their own software to force blunders in your game immediately following your flagging an opponent for cheating. Predictable, over and over like clockwork, your move following detection of and accusation of cheating will be "misplaced" by you where plainly the worst consequences calculable will result, time after time. THEY HACK THEIR OWN SOFTWARE to punish you, an explicit direct violation of Google Play policy for developers. Report this to Google with video evidence. Google does absolutely nothing.
Lichess lies like a dog about " detecting" sandbagging cheaters. Their PUBLISHED DATA a priori identifies sandbaggers as such, yet near half of my opponents' profile show a long history of playing way way over their elo, 800,900 points above their published elo, thus openly cheating and confessing explicitly to cheating in chat. Lichess could purge them all with couple of commands. In 3 years they never have. Several reasons - more eyeballs to watch their ads means more $, their sole goal, public relations notwithstanding.
Both Lichess and Chess.com maintain segragated groups they don't admit to. They cook the books in their reports of policy enforcement. You can be silently segregated into groups that receive no policy enforcement, no customer service, where they ignore your every email, where open cheating and gross misbehavior approach 33% or more of all opponents, none of which is included in their published claims to the contrary. They serve a SELECT group well, and move you around silently and unannounced into hellish abusive groups that they deny even exist. Your opponents play soft then supposedly see mate in 6? Nope. Open, unchecked, shameless nonstop cheating and both Lichess & Chess.com won't even reply to emails for support, which is another explicit line item violation of Google Play policy for developers. Developers don't care because Google Play does absolutely nothing about it. Why? $$$$$$

It is extremely difficult to connect with a friend to play; it takes too long to get a connection!

Worst site ever! Worst site ever worst site ever worst site ever