2024 Lichess Meetup in Berlin

From the 7th - 11th of November, 21 Lichess team members from several nations around the world travelled to Berlin for the annual team and public meetup.

Since 2013, Lichess team members have met up once a year in person. Most of the early meetups were in Paris, as Lichess is based in France, followed by meetups in Oslo, London, Montreal, Lisbon, and Barcelona.

Since the team mostly work together remotely online, from different countries, meetups are always a great opportunity for team members to meet and get to know each other even better in real life. This helps to foster closer friendships and better working relationships since working exclusively online presents many challenges, not just limited to timezone and language differences.

It’s not all work...

After arriving and settling into the Airbnbs on Friday, the team’s first group activity was an evening run around the cold streets of Templehof led by one of the team’s running enthusiasts, and it was surprisingly well attended with 8 runners, taking it at a steady pace for around 4 km. The serious runners went for another, faster run right after this. The most serious runner even went for a 20km sightseeing run around Berlin the next day! Those who couldn't participate in the run for different reasons, but would have been highly motivated otherwise, were commissioned with the purchase of snacks and drinks.

After the run, the team gathered in one of the Airbnbs for an OTB bughouse session with takeaway food into the small hours. For some reason, it ended up largely splitting into national teams...

England 5-0 Germany*
England 2-1 Italy
France 3 - 2 England
Italy 4 - 2 Germany
Women** 2 - Italy 2

*Obviously if WFM @Funkmaus had been in the German team on this occasion the scoreline would have almost certainly been different.
** "Women" isn't a national team but for the record, the women (Funkmaus and QRM) were leading Italy 2-1, and on request, graciously allowed Italy an opportunity to equalise with the last game to salvage their pride.

Weekend Work

As Lichess is a charity, mostly powered by volunteers, Lichess team members are well used to fitting in their Lichess work around their own day jobs and family commitments, so weekend working is nothing out of the ordinary.

On Saturday morning, the team gathered in a nearby workspace to get some work done.

Projects included: some significant translation adaptations and changes; planning and organisation around the major upcoming events in the chess calendar; fine-tuning and updating some of our statistical models for tournament predictions; a discussion on the future plans for Irwin, our automated cheat detection tool; technical work across systems administration and our backend; a rather meta discussion about Lichess meetups and our plans for them next year and the year after; and a look and open discussion into our governance, finances, vision, and mission, and plans for the year ahead.

But it wasn’t all work — we also found opportunities to play some OTB chess at the co-working space, and also eat delicious vegan food.

In the evening after a hard day's work, we had another Lichess meetup tradition — a team meal together at a restaurant. Over food and drink, the team got to know each other on a more social level, including the friends and partners of our team.

While the dinner ended at around 23:00, some continued socialising into the early hours of the morning — sharing drinks and snacks from their home countries, and (you guessed it!) playing a lot of OTB bughouse.

Meanwhile, on Sunday morning, work continued, along with some rather tasty Turkish pastries (they were so good even one of the Greeks thought they were better than the pastries their grandmother makes), kindly purchased and shared by our charity President.

As morning rolled into the afternoon, it became time for another long-standing tradition of Lichess meetups - the community meetup!

Public Meetup

Kindly hosted by TSG Oberschöneweide, from 16:00 until around 21:00, the Lichess team met with the Berlin and German chess community. In total, around 50 people made their way on a cold November evening to join us, at rather late notice.

An informal, impromptu blitz tournament was held, continuing the “IRLichess” tradition, with some Lichess team members also participating. We will blame the overall poor performance of Lichess team members on the open bar that Lichess provided.

The top five players in the blitz event who weren't part of the Lichess team received Lichess merchandise of their choice as prizes.

Afterwards we chatted with the community, answered some questions, and received some interesting ideas and feedback.

It’s always enjoyable to meet users and supporters, and it's motivating to hear encouragement and support of what we do — so thank you to everyone who came, participated, and joined us! We had a great time, and hope you did too. And, many thanks again to TSG Oberschöneweide and Paul Meyer-Dunker in particular for their tireless efforts and assistance in hosting this event!

On Sunday night, back in the Airbnbs, we said our farewells but not without first playing the bughouse finals. Despite a dominant English performance on the previous nights, the rapidly assembled French team took them on in a tense back-and-forth match, and emerged victorious to topple the defending champions. The rematch will have to happen at the next meetup!

And, where will the next meetup happen? It’s still not certain — although the USA, Morocco, Greece, France, and India were all given as suggestions — but regardless of where it happens, there was broad consensus on giving the community greater awareness for the next ones!