ChessEver Founder Calls Lichess "Communist"
By Douglas C. · Wed, 14 Oct 2026
Grandmaster Vasif Durarbayli, the founder of the live-chess app ChessEver, has set out how he sees the online chess landscape in a thread on X, describing Chess.com as the capitalist end of the spectrum and Lichess as the communist end, with ChessEver aiming for the middle.
Grandmaster Vasif Durarbayli, the founder of the live-chess app ChessEver, has set out how he sees the online chess landscape in a thread on X, describing Chess.com as the capitalist end of the spectrum and Lichess as the communist end, with ChessEver aiming for the middle. Within a day, after a Reddit post focused on the word "communist," he published a clarification saying he misread the Lichess founder's GitHub bio and will not keep using the label.
The pitch: one place for every live event
Durarbayli says ChessEver grew out of his frustration, as a player and fan, with hunting for tournaments across platforms. His stated policy is that the app does not pick favorites and covers any event with a live feed. He says the frontend is open source, taking inspiration from Lichess, but that ChessEver is a for-profit business that he wants to make money. In his view, Chess.com's commercial model has helped it contribute more to chess than Lichess has, though profit alone would not satisfy him. His argument is that if organizers can earn revenue from audiences, they can offer players better conditions. The open-source claim is his own and was not checked here.
His criticisms of Chess.com
Durarbayli points to three decisions he says show Chess.com choosing profit when the aims conflict: the end of the Pro Chess League, cuts to the Champions Chess Tour, and a Titled Tuesday prize fund that stayed flat while participation requirements rose.
Chess.com announced on January 20, 2024 that it was discontinuing the Pro Chess League, saying the league had not drawn the viewership it expected and demanded more resources than almost any other event it runs. The Champions Chess Tour shrank over the same period, according to Wikipedia's tour pages: seven events and a $2 million total in 2023, five events and $1.7 million in 2024, and two online events with $300,000 in 2025, when the tour became a qualifier for the Esports World Cup.
On Titled Tuesday, Durarbayli notes the weekly prize fund has since gone up to $10,000, and Chess.com's announcement confirms it, beginning with the June 2, 2026 event. Chess.com's coverage put the previous total at $3,000 and said the new first prize of $2,500 nearly matches it. The company credited its Proctor fair-play system with making online prize events secure enough to justify a larger investment. Chess.com has not responded to the thread in any source reviewed here, and Durarbayli's reading of these decisions is a view about motive, not an established fact.
The clarification on Lichess
In the follow-up, Durarbayli says he apologized to Lichess founder Thibault Duplessis. He had taken the wording of Duplessis's GitHub bio seriously and thought it reflected the founder's philosophy, but Duplessis explained it was satire about labels others had applied to Lichess. The bio does list a string of exaggerated descriptions of the site, communist among them. In a reply on X, a user named Theo Wait said it is a long-standing reference to a troll who used the phrase about Duplessis and Lichess, that Duplessis uses it tongue in cheek, and that it is basically a meme. Durarbayli answered that he did not know the history, had taken the bio literally, and that Duplessis had also reached out to explain. Durarbayli says he meant the word to refer to free access, equal treatment for users and voluntary contributions, not as an insult. He still sees similarities behind the comparison, but calls it his interpretation, not how Lichess describes itself.
Who is behind ChessEver
Durarbayli is a former World Youth Champion. ChessBase India has reported that seven investors back ChessEver, including grandmasters Ashwin Jayaram, Burak Firat, Alex Colovic and Denes Boros, and that his longer-term plan is a broadcasting platform where organizers earn money from viewers. ChessEver competes in live-event coverage with platforms such as Chess.com, which is worth keeping in mind when weighing his criticism of it.
