Screen Time? For Chess, Yes!

Howdy! It’s The Chess Friends!

Today, we will cover some of our favorite online chess platforms. Without further ado, let’s dive in!

Chessing at a French Cafe

ChessKid (chesskid.com)

ChessKid is the #1 chess site for kids and is the scholastic extension site for Chess.com, which we will cover later. It’s safe and free! You can also get a Gold Membership to get unlimited puzzles and videos. On ChessKid, you can play games against kids at different time controls, play bots, play online tournaments, do puzzles (there’s also a fun thing called puzzle duel, which is a 1v1 puzzle competition), take lessons, watch super funny but instructive videos, and analyze games. There are tons of great resources to help you become a better player! This website is good for beginners who want to learn the basics.

Chess (chess.com)  

Chess.com is a great place to play and learn chess, with several variant options, great analysis, and lots of resources to help you learn. There are chat features and other things you might not want as a kid, but there are ways to disable those, so be sure to do that ahead of time before you use the site. For new adult players, it is fantastic. 

Lichess (lichess.org)

Lichess is an awesome place to play chess, and it's absolutely free! You can create neat studies to share your games with your coaches, annotate, and analyze. There are a lot of opportunities to play games against people from all over the world, and you can join tournaments that happen every hour. It has the nicest analysis board, which we used to make illustrations with chess puzzles for our book

Chessly (chessly.com)  

Chessly is a fantastic resource to help you learn chess from the #1 chess content creator in the world, Levy Rozman, aka GothamChess. It has a ton of content and is growing fast. When you’ve reached around 1200 rating, it is fantastic to help you get to 1600, and maybe even as high as 2000. The drill shuffle features and short videos are perfect for kids looking to take their chess to the next level. 

Chessable (chessable.com)

Chessable is excellent for high level chess learning, with several courses to help you improve. It is ideal for players who have already reached a 1600 or so rating and are looking to rise even higher. It’s particularly great for players between 1800 and 2200 from our experience. 

OpeningTree (openingtree.com) 

OpeningTree is a fantastic way to prepare for opponents if you know their usernames on chess.com or LiChess, which we covered before. It’s also a good way to see your own stats and help identify some strengths and challenges in your own play using data. Realistically, preparing for opponents is a thing that happens in closed fields, which occur more when you reach a rating of around 1800. 

Listudy (listudy.org)

Listudy is a goated website to learn openings, do puzzles, study endgames, and make your own studies. Blind puzzles are a nice feature, where you are given a position with notation that you have to mentally visualize and find the final tactic after the notation ends. This way you practice how to see many different lines in your head. Give it a try!

These are just a few of our favorite resources, among tons of other great websites out there. You can find places online to look for tournaments, check ratings, buy chess equipment, and more, but those largely vary region by region. Search up your local chess club or rating system and find more there, or message us where you’re from and your level, and we can try to connect you to more local resources. 

Three Cheers, Fellow Future Master Chess Friends!

The Man Benji, The Myth Sarang, and The Legend Vivi

P.S. The "actual" #1 online resource for all things chess is... drumroll please...

Chess Friends Books (chessfriendsbooks.com)

You NEED to add this to your bookmarks/favorites and check back often for weekly updates and info on the release of Q & A Chess: Tournament Edition.