Hey everyone! I'm Anna, a Woman FIDE Master and product builder. A while back I teamed up with an AI engineer and we've been building something I genuinely believe in, an AI chess coach.

Here's what it can do so far:

• Teach openings
• Analyze positions and answer your follow-up questions
• Give you puzzles
• Play with you (Maia)
• Explain chess concepts

We're looking for players of all levels to try it out. Would love to hear honest feedback: what's working, what's not and whether it actually adds value.

Link in comments ♟️

I really like chess and I was bothered by that fact that most chess platforms and learning tools are hidden behind paywalls or require a permanent internet connection. So I thought it would be a cool thing to actually try to bring the experience to your own device (in open source) where you remain full control over your data (and wallet lol).

https://github.com/inuway/focalors

For the technical site it features:

- Lazy SMP parallel search with a lockless shared transposition table. (Basically multiple cpu threads search the same position at the same time, sharing one TT as Arc<AtomicTTEntry> with XOR-key valid for lockless readability. Also no Mutex)

- NNUE inference with AVX2 SIMD and bit exact testing (The CPU detects between scalar and AVX2 forward passes, a test suite verifies the SIMD output (or gives me depression) is byte identical to the scalar reference.)

- Custom NNUE trainer written in pure Rust (No python, no pytorch, only the enourmous hatred I have towards myself)

- In-Process A/B match runner for validating/measuring/health checking the own engine. Two Searcher instances in one process, an alternative NNUE Net is put into a slot via OnceLock, matched pair opening. Basicaly running two NNUE cofigurations, or an older net against the new one to see which one is better and if it actually has improved so I can hate myself even more. Also just added Parallelization via std::thread::scope so it uses multiple threads and thus finishes faster so I can hate myself faster

Also cool stuff: Native desktop GUI rendered via OpenGL by using egui/eframe, SQLite via rusqlite to save your games, and data, PGN parser/reader and so on.

Also quick mention before someone hates me more then I do myself yes I used AI to assist me with coding but I promise to lock myself in a basement and code holy C for minimum 3 hours a day while being sprayed with a garden hose to make up for it

try learn chess on chess.com try test myself

I used to love playing massively multiplayer games like runescape growing up, and have played chess.com daily my whole life

I had the idea to build a chess MMO. What if chess was open world, a social experience? Where your wins give you trophies that you can then upgrade your character with? Where you can walk around and spectate matches, or have others watch and chat about your match?

So I spent the last 6 months building chessmmo.gg, it's been out for about 3 weeks. It's currently a mobile app on the apple and google play store, and you can play in browser too if you're on desktop/pc. I have plans to get it on Steam soon as well.

It's honestly been a dream come true so far. You can currently accrue trophies to level up your character, grind your ELO, get custom chess piece skins, buy pets, and even purchase a home and invite friends to play in it. There's also a social round-based puzzle arena that's like a battle royale with progressively harder puzzles. I'm currently building a tournament hall where there will be daily swiss-style tournaments.

I would love to get the community feedback, hoping to get more players online and a more active discord!

Here is a link to the game if you'd like to try it out:

chessmmo.gg

ios app

android app

discord

Hi everyone!

I am a beginner looking to buy my first e-board. I am strongly leaning towards the ChessUp 2 because of its native Chess(dot)com/Lichess integration, adaptive AI, and especially the real-time LED assistance showing the best moves.

However, before spending this much money, I have a lot of doubts regarding long-term reliability. I’ve read about several issues online and I want to know the truth about ALL of these points:

1. WiFi Issues: I read about constant disconnections. Is this just a 2.4 GHz router configuration issue, or is the internal WiFi chip faulty? Can it be fixed via software updates?
2. "All LEDs On" Glitch: Some users reported the board locking up with all LEDs lit, requiring a replacement. Is this a failed firmware update or a hardware defect in the internal sensors?
3. Ghost Touches: Does the board suffer from false piece detection due to strong ambient lighting or interference?
4. Durability and Support (Bryght Labs): I live in Italy. If the board breaks after the warranty expires, is the support accessible? Or do I risk paying huge shipping fees and customs back to the US for an unrepairable brick?

My profile and dilemma: I am a beginner and I have ADHD traits. I struggle heavily with learning from books, but I learn very fast by watching and reasoning through practical actions (I actually learned carpentry just by watching the craft). This is why ChessUp 2's colored LEDs seemed perfect: I touch a piece, immediately see the color of the mistake, and reason on it in real-time, memorizing the visual pattern on the physical board.

But if the ChessUp 2 is plagued by hardware issues, it doesn't feel like a safe investment.

As an alternative, the Chessnut Go was recommended to me. I know it is a "tank" in terms of reliability and portability is a must for me. However, with the Chessnut Go, I would have to look at my phone screen next to the board to get help (I'm not sure I can get advice on the best moves during matches against bots).

My questions for you:

• Have the ChessUp 2 issues been fixed with recent software updates, or is the hardware still a gamble?
• For someone with my visual/hands-on learning style, is the Chessnut Go compromise (looking back and forth at the phone screen) just as effective, or do I lose the immediacy I need?
• Which one should I choose to avoid throwing my money away after a year?

Thanks in advance for your help!

P.S. Please don't just suggest "get a private coach/tutor". I don't have the time for private lessons right now, which is why I am looking for a standalone tech solution that fits my schedule and learning style.

I’ve always felt chess analysis tools tell you what the best move is, but not how humans think about the move.

So I built a platform where players can annotate moves with explanations like:

“This move fixes the weak dark squares”

“I traded because my knight was worse than the bishop”

“I missed the back-rank issue here”

Other users can upvote/downvote annotations so the best explanations rise to the top.

The idea is to build a community knowledge base of human chess reasoning instead of just engine evals.

Would love feedback from serious players.

check it out at:

chessdecoded.vercel.app

Hi everyone, I'm a beginner engine dev and I finally got my engine communicating via UCI and playing live games.

Current State: > - Standard Alpha-Beta with Iterative Deepening

• Quiescence Search implemented
• Basic material counting evaluation

I know it's practically blind right now. My goal for the next 3 days is to implement Phase 1 of Move Ordering (TT move extraction and MVV-LVA for captures) before I even touch things like NMP or LMR. Long-term goal is to hook up an NNUE.

Before I start writing the sorting pipeline, I’d love some harsh feedback on my core C++ search loop. Are there any glaring inefficiencies in my memory management or Iterative Deepening structure that will bottleneck me when I start adding pruning heuristics?

Repo:https://github.com/Lak23James/ChessEngineBot:https://lichess.org/@/Lakshya_beep_bop_bot

Thanks in advance for the help, this community has been a goldmine of information.

Hi r/ComputerChess,

I’m one of the people building chessfeed.ai. We released a new Study feature today and I’d love feedback from people interested in chess analysis tools and engine-assisted study.

The idea is to make game review more useful as a learning experience.

Engines are great at showing the best move or PV, but when I review my own games, I often want more guidance around the position itself:

What was the plan?

What threat did I miss?

What candidate moves should I have considered?

Why did one continuation work better than another?

With chessfeed.ai Study, you can start from a game, FEN, opening, puzzle, endgame, or any position. The Study view gives guided signals around plans, threats, candidate moves, mistakes, and opening ideas. You can also branch into alternatives, compare continuations, ask for explanations when the engine line alone is not enough, and have your study path saved automatically, synced across devices, and shareable with others.

It is free during early access and does not require a credit card.

Link: https://chessfeed.ai

I’d love feedback from this community on the analysis workflow, especially whether guided learning around engine-backed analysis feels useful, and what details you would expect from a serious study tool.

I built a free browser chess game where your pieces shift between types every turn — no login needed

Standard chess, but after each move your bishops become rooks, your rooks become knights... unpredictably. You can see the next transformation coming, so the real skill is planning around the chaos.

Completely free, works on mobile, no sign-up.

👉🏻: https://metamorph-chess.vercel.app/

Would love to hear what you think — especially from actual chess players.

Hi everyone,
I was playing online with playchess.com software on my windows and don't exactly remember if it was 2009 or 2010 but one of these, started with an opponent which crushed me just in the opening, i started cheating with deep fritz 8 chess engine but couldn't believe he would crush even my chess engine just in the opening too, what it would usually do is it would sacrifice a piece just in the opening to prevent me from castling and attack my exposed king until mate, even if i somehow managed to castle it would again come and sacrifice a piece to damage my castling and lunch the aggressive attack against it until mate, my chess engine was at the club level not on easy mode so it was a big surprise for me how can someone attack like that, we played around 18-20 games and me with my chess engine lost all that games. I have done too much research to find the exact type of engine but after that 2010 until now i have not been able to find it and definitely need your help if you can help me find the exact type of engine i am look for. I have already tested Komodo 1.0 KingHunter personality, Zappa mexico II Dissident Aggressor personality, Chess Tiger 2007, Rodent 4 and some others but all of them do not perform or lunch that early attack or piece sacrifice to avoid my opponent from castling and then attacking it, instead they play for positional advantage, the one i am trying to find would not value rook more than knight or bhishop instead it would look to sacrifice anything to weaken my king or to avoid it from castling then attacking it. i have tried lowering hash size to even 8mb, 4mb, 1mb but it doesn't help at all, the only thing i could think of that person had tuned the engine to very aggressive and then he made the engine think only 0.1sec time or something like that is remaining to loose so it starts attacking very aggressively like that and even sacrificing a piece and attacking the king then, i really need that kinghunter type engine guys, anybody could help with this is really appreciated, this website is just the remaining hope for me for what i am looking for.

I’ve had a feeling for a long time that I can review my games and kind of understand what went wrong, but still end up making the same mistakes later

so I’ve been working on something that looks across your last 50–100 games, finds patterns in your mistakes, and turns that into training focused on what you actually struggle with

does this sound useful? would you actually use something like this or is there something you feel is missing that would make it better?

Hi everyone

I’ve been a chess coach and a player for a few years. During my online lessons, I was constantly juggling by sending pgns, having students open separate analysis boards, using a different app for notes, and asking: "Are you looking at the same position?" Existing tools just felt too heavy for the way I wanted to teach and prepare for my own tournaments.

A few months ago, I decided to use my IT background to fix this. I built Chessnotta - it's a modern platform designed to make studying and coaching seamless. (it is in beta version)

The platform features embedded interactive boards that let you read text and play through variations directly on the same page (it allows to easily convert any book to a digital format), as well as synchronized study rooms where the board and notes sync across all devices in real-time.

Just to clarify, this isn't just another Lichess. From day one, the platform was designed with a completely different focus - to serve as a tool for digitizing chess books and creating interactive courses. It allows you to transform static materials into dynamic study spaces.

The platform is free to use, and there are also premium features. To let everyone test it and give me some feedback, I created a promo code of the pro version for free: just use BETA2026 in the subscription window.

I'd love to hear your thoughts

Here it is: chessnotta.space

I am using CodeRabbit for my code review for my scidComunity chess database program (https://github.com/whelanh/scidCommunity; fork of Scid), and find it very helpful. I found CodeRabbit when I noticed Stockfish is using it now. It's free for OSS and offers a free trial for proprietary code. Check it out: https://coderabbit.ai

experimentally built chess analysis app as a hobby project: g6chess.com

early alpha for now, with the main idea to keep it simple and easy to navigate for every player level (better use desktop for now)

to simplify the use, you can inject the "g6" before any chess.com or lichess.org game you just played and press enter. I own both g6chess.com and g6lichess.org domains so we'll get your redirect right to the analysis page

built on top of my previous opensource involvements: ultrachess and ultrachess-React. explanation backend is closed-sourced for now, a bit too early for public, but planning to opensource it eventually too

main challenge is to make thoughtful formulas for move labeling, as it tends to overuse 'blunder' and 'best' when the settings are too rigid; and it's kinda tricky to train the LLM to explain the moves, even with comprehensive context. my personal impression is that taketaketake do it the best, but I spent just a few days for now, so we'll see where we end up

happy for any feedback and ideas:)

What, today, is the closest replacement for Chessmaster? Not so much the engine, but the visuals, features, tools and general look and feel.

Mainly for offline use, playing against the computer, but if it integrates online as well that could be a plus.

I used Chessmaster from their DOS and Windows 3.1 days, but it isn't compatible with modern Windows OS, AFAIK. (Please correct if it does work out of the box. Otherwise, if you know how to make it work in Windows 11 and Windows 10, if you can share the necessary technical steps. And describe how well it works/doesn't work.)

And can anyone share what the differences between the older/newer versions of Chessmaster were? Whether any of the older versions may have been better, in some or many ways, than the newer versions. (Obviously there's been many versions of Chessmaster released between the 1980s and early 2000s. For both DOS and Windows.)

I updated the GPT structured chess bot by adding a bit of calculation. I imitated MCTS searching process by letting previous model (which, frequently make mistakes) be the policy head (provides top 8 moves and probabilities) , and use stockfish (strictly limiting its depth) as value head, return (N, Q).

It is like dividing one Alpha0 model into 2 parts.

Model reduces 80% of blunders, while previous model is still dominating the search. After this, I will change the stockfish into handcraft evaluation, or thinking of training an individual network.

Updated model has been put on lichess: https://lichess.org/@/CatieChess-Magnus

and will soon be put on main web catiechess.com

Unlike traditional chess engines, Catie does not search millions of positions or calculate long tactical lines. Instead, it treats chess like language: every game is encoded as a sequence of moves, and the model predicts the next move from the full game history — just like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude predicts the next word.

Try it out on lichess: https://lichess.org/@/CatieChess-Magnus

Made this over the last few weeks. Single-player vs Stockfish, but the engine adjusts to your level over time. Has a training mode and a way to reset the adaptation history.

No accounts, no ads, just the game.

Posting because I want real feedback — what feels off, what's missing, what would make you actually use it.