Chess Leaderboard Screensaver
The Chess Leaderboard screensaver ranks the world's top-rated chess players across time controls, drawn key-less and live from Lichess's public API. It's free, runs in your browser, and ESC exits.
Live preview
Press ESC to leave fullscreen. Settings are saved in your browser only.
How the Chess Leaderboard screensaver works
The saver fetches Lichess's real current top-players leaderboard for your chosen time control, with no key required.
Each player ranks with their real username and current rating.
Choose bullet, blitz, rapid or classical to see a different real leaderboard.
The board refreshes on a schedule to track real rating changes.
How Lichess ratings work
Lichess is a free, open-source chess server. Its public API provides a top-players leaderboard for each performance category, including bullet, blitz, rapid, classical and variants such as Chess960. The ratings are internal to Lichess, so they describe performance against other Lichess users and not a standing in the wider chess world.
Lichess uses the Glicko-2 rating system, devised by Mark Glickman as a refinement of his earlier Glicko system, itself developed as an improvement on Elo. Glicko tracks a rating deviation, a measure of how reliable a rating is: a larger deviation means more uncertainty. Glicko-2 adds a volatility value, reflecting how consistent a player's results are. New Lichess players start at 1500.
Numbers across systems are not interchangeable. Lichess ratings often read higher than FIDE ratings, which use Elo, but Lichess says that reflects different systems and not inflation, and the two cannot be compared directly. Chess.com uses its own pool as well, so treat the board as a snapshot of online play on one site.
A worked example
Set it to Blitz and the real current top-rated blitz players on Lichess appear in order — a genuine, live leaderboard, not a static list.
Settings & tips
- Time control switches between bullet, blitz, rapid and classical leaderboards.
- Accent recolours the rank numbers.
- This is distinct from the site's Lichess TV saver, which streams a single live game.
Frequently asked questions
- How is this different from Lichess TV?
- Lichess TV streams one live featured game; this ranks the real top-rated players by time control.
- Is a key needed?
- No — Lichess's public API is free and key-less.
- Is this FIDE ratings?
- No — these are real Lichess platform ratings, a different (though related) rating pool from official FIDE ratings.
- Is it free?
- Yes — free, no download, in your browser.
- What does the rating deviation mean in Glicko-2?
- It measures how reliable a player's rating is. A larger deviation means more uncertainty about the true strength.
- Are Lichess ratings the same as FIDE ratings?
- No. Lichess uses Glicko-2 and FIDE uses Elo, so the numbers are not directly comparable. Lichess ratings often read higher than FIDE ratings.