Proudly announcing Lichess Ladders integration in Lichess via LiChess Tools

Intro

I first heard of Lichess Ladders via Hanging Pawns (@hpy) who praised it as a great idea for high quality slow chess. The idea is very simple: you have rankings of people playing a particular time control (classical or correspondence). Then those people climb these ladders by challenging people just above them and winning at chess.

This involves some rules and synchronization between players and that's what Lichess Ladders does. Considering this part is the most annoying of them all - think of organizing an office party, convincing 20 people to RVSP, then wait at the 20 people table until only 7 arrive, and late - I give great kudos to the site creator.

Now, the games are played on Lichess, the login is via Lichess users. This is not yet another platform trying to make you play on their site, it's an addition to Lichess, rather than a replacement. Hmm, kind of like LiChess Tools if you think of it...

The integration

When you install LiChess Tools, you get the integration enabled by default, so if you don't want it, you just have to disable it from preferences.

You get a new menu item in the Play section called Lichess Ladders summary and also notifications for when messages are sent within a challenge.

Clicking the summary menu item will open a new page which shows (with nice game boards):

• the list of available ladders
  • the ones you joined are first and they show the number of challenges, your rank and your evolution (green up or red down)
• the list of your running and upcoming challenges
• the list of upcoming challenges
  • I think it's for the next two hours, but not totally sure
• the list of running games

You even get a nice button to challenge your opponent in Lichess with the proper settings if you are the challenger and the game has not started.

The hope

The rules and restrictions may feel annoying at first, but then you realize that they are a filter. People who make the effort to be on those ladders are more likely to be serious about playing the games.

There is a problem with slow chess on online platforms, I believe, where a lot of people just use it to not have clock stress, but still blitz it out or try it and leave unceremoniously when they get bored, thus demotivating the few people who do want to play slow chess.

Well, with Lichess Ladders you know that, as you climb them, people made more effort to get there, so you get to play better and better chess with people who cared enough to be there.

My hope is that this will encourage better quality chess while improving the chess community at the same time.

Conclusion

LiChess Tools adds hundreds of new functionalities to Lichess, but for me only a few made me really proud, mainly the ones that make people enjoy learning chess and coming together to play this game. So I am proudly presenting this integration with Lichess Ladders as something I genuinely believe will help and improve quality of life.

This thing made me start playing correspondence chess! Also, as Lichess and LiChess Tools, it's a completely free platform. See you there!

Here you see another advantage of the extension, the ability to bridge separate software projects without adding to the maintenance burden of any of them. If you do have a chess project you think might improve the chess experience and/or the community, think of this as a possible solution.

Let me know what you think and as always, send me your stories!