“From time to time, like many other players, I glance through my own games of earlier years, and return to positions and variations which have gone out of practice. I attempt to restore them, to find new ideas and plans.” — Yefim Geller
A Chess Community members at LiChess and Hive are, no doubt, fully aware of the Lichess.org platform qualities. Their motto is quite simple and effective – see the cover pic. Aside of this important feature, Lichess.org has an extensive set of excellent training tools, and the top rated StockFish 14+ engine for the game analysis.
Among 700,000 members you have a bunch of top grandmasters from all over the World, with the incumbent World Champion...
Let’s not forget a feature that I consider very important:
“We do not track you. It’s a rare feature, nowadays.” — lichess.org
All those features are really great, and the members of a club are terrific, you may ask what’s the gripe? Well, there is one which you might not care for, but I consider it really bad.
You see, if Yefim Geller (see the leading quote) would try to find his own games of earlier years classified by the openings – he would be desperate! In the Advanced Search menu, you have many fields, but not the one most needed – search by the ECO (Encyclopaedia of Chess Openings) code categorized into five broad areas ("A" through "E"), with each of those broken down into one hundred subcategories ("00" through "99"). That ECO code is sorely missing from the Advanced search:
For example: you have just seen a beautiful game between Le Quang Liem and Jorden Van Foreest, where Le won with a marvelous positional Queen sacrifice in a Slav Defense variant.
And you will never find it in the massive Lichess database, because you can’t search with the query ‘Slav Defense’ or D16. It’s not just a shame, it is a BIG OMISSION that should be corrected A.S.A.P.
Well, I have tried to raise the question in the Lichess blog, but nobody reacted. I can’t get in touch with the platform owners. At least not alone. That might be a job for the community. For all of you who regularly participate in LiChess tournaments:
