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Hey everyone!

I've recently been getting more serious about learning chess and improving my game. I play on Chess.com, and although I know Lichess is free and powerful, I personally prefer Chess.com's interface because it feels simpler and less overwhelming. Plus, my friends play there, so I'd prefer to continue playing on that platform.

However, my biggest issue is game analysis.

On Chess.com, I can only use Game Review once per day for free. I can analyse games manually, but the engine primarily shows the best moves, threats, evaluations, and variations without always providing the detailed explanations I'm looking for.

I'm not a high-level player, but I'm also looking beyond basic explanations. I want to understand WHY a move is a blunder, what positional or tactical idea I missed, what my opponent was threatening, and why the engine's recommended move is better. I want to improve my understanding of chess rather than simply memorise engine lines.

Recently, I explored a few alternatives:

- Lichess: Free and powerful, but its analysis mainly focuses on engine lines and evaluations. I often have to work out the reasoning behind a recommended move myself.

- Chessis: Seems to offer many useful features, but several are paid, and importing games requires copying and pasting PGN or game data.

- Chessigma: So far, this has been my favourite alternative. I like that it can import games directly from Chess.com and Lichess, and I find its analysis and explanations useful.

- ChessRank: It also supports importing games from both platforms, but I found its analysis experience slower and less engaging.

These are just my personal impressions based on my experience so far, and I may not have explored every feature.

My ideal analysis tool would offer:

1. Easy game importing from Chess.com and Lichess.

2. Unlimited or reasonably accessible game analysis.

3. Detailed explanations of inaccuracies, mistakes, and blunders, including the reasoning behind the engine's preferred move.

4. Explanations of tactical opportunities, positional weaknesses, missed threats, and alternative continuations.

5. Free or reasonably priced access to these features.

Are there any other websites, apps, or tools I should try?

Is Chessigma a good option for improving at chess, or are there better alternatives that explain engine recommendations in greater depth?

I'd also appreciate advice on how to analyse my own games effectively and develop a stronger understanding of the positions rather than relying entirely on engine evaluations.

Thanks in advance!

How do yall build a repertoire? How do I separate the chapters? Should I be putting all of white in one study and all of black in the other?

I wanted to say thank you to Lichess, and show what your open puzzle database made possible.

I run Daily Scribe, a small free service that emails a PDF to your Kindle Scribe (an e-ink tablet you can write on) each morning. I've just added a chess section, built entirely on the Lichess puzzle database.

How it uses the data:

• Puzzles are picked from five rating bands, Beginner (under 1200) to Expert (2400+). Only well-tested puzzles make the cut: lots of plays, high popularity, and a settled rating.
• Each puzzle shows the board from the solver's side and the task (like "Mate in 2"). You solve it with the pen, right on the page.
• The solutions page shows a small board after every move, plus a short guide to reading notation, so beginners can learn as they go.
• Every solution links back to its lichess.org/training page, and every page credits Lichess.

The database being Creative Commons is what made this possible for a one-person project, so thank you to everyone who builds Lichess and everyone whose games and votes shaped those puzzles. I credit your project on every puzzle.

For full disclosure: I built Daily Scribe with a lot of help from Claude, Anthropic's AI coding assistant. The puzzles themselves are 100% Lichess, not AI-generated. The project is open source (AGPLv3) in the same spirit as Lichess: github.com/RonanOD/dailyscribe

It's bad enough that the report system isn't integrated into the mobile app, so reporting someone involves opening the browser and logging in there, which makes the whole process like 40 times more annoying. For example, on this instance the website forgot I was trying to report after I logged back in, so I had to find the game again and go to report again.

It's also annoying enough that people who stall games where a forced mate is on the board even need to be reported. This is easy enough to detect automatically and someone who does this at one point has almost certainly done it in the past. This guy should've been banned a long time ago.

It's almost fucking funny that they've now integrated an automated link detection system into the report form and that it doesn't even fucking work. I guess the admins got tired of doing their job, even though I can't imagine they have many reports coming in with the system being this fucking annoying to use. So now the stupid form expects what I can only assume to be a very fucking specific link format because none of the ones in the screenshot are recognized as links.

Are we fucking for real?

EDIT: Title should say "report system". Sorry.

EDIT 2: To the people saying anyone complaining could help implement the report system themselves, the system is almost certainly this annoying by design, which is why I am complaining in the first place. My suspicion is lichess doesn't want people impulsively reporting people for cheating and doesn't want to enforce the various bad sportsmanship rules they seem to have, so they just make it semi-impossible to report people.

I get that reasoning to be honest, but the current system is completely ridiculous. It's basically never worth it to report someone here. Even in these cases when someone is stalling, so there is a much lower risk of some kind of subjective interpretation of them breaking the rules, reporting them is a process that takes like 5 minutes at least. And even when I do bother to submit the report, they never get banned anyway! So what is the point?

Either make it actually feasible to report this shit and starting actually enforcing the rules, or just say transparently that you don't believe stalling games is unsportsmanlike enough and declare it to be within the rules. This idiotic system where it's technically prohibited (and the automated system even warns you not to do it), but de facto completely fine is idiotic.

4 minutes thinking time as well for this!

https://lichess.org/broadcast/41st-european-chess-club-cup-2026-open/round-6/ODwnQra2/fHKJPYm6

I seem to be running into players who will take their time but still play moves at a regular pace, like opening 20-30 seconds, mid game sometimes 40 seconds between moves.... Maybe a minute, whatever.

So I'll be in a winning position and they disappear for 5+ minutes, maybe make a sandwich or something, but then I go from a strong position to getting checkmated very quickly.

This 1 game the opponent let the clock run down from 8 minutes to 17 seconds, then hopped back on and won the game.

I use the game analysis and it seems like they don't play every top engine move after they come back, just most of them.

Is there any chance they just really thought the position through or should I report those people?

Created an app mostly for repertoire building and analysis based on your repertoire but the main purpose was to be able to play Lichess on my fold 8 ultra without tiny little clocks I couldn't see.

Website is outofbook.net but would love some volunteers to test the actual app to get through play store. Very much in beta but foldable phones or tablets this is much better IMO. Message or reply and I'll make you an internal tester.

When I click it during a game, the screen goes blank and it gives that error after a while. I already updated the app. Is this an issue from the app or mine?

basicaly what the title says. 10 min game and me and my opponent were both running low on time. i had like under 1 min left. I panicked and blundered. SAD! then immediately resigned but it said i was timed out for running the clock. WE BOTH HAD LOW TIME. I mean i had approx. a few min less than they did but still i was not running the clock. during the game at most a turn took me was 45 seconds of thinking. Theres no support like on chess.com so idk how to get the restriction removed.

It says add a link, but I added a link to the game…

I know, i should calculate everything in my head, but i like to explore position there a lot

Is it just me going through a bad period, or is something actually happening?

Over the past few weeks, I've felt there has been a sudden increase in cheating. Could it be driven by the rapid improvements in AI and LLMs, combined with the fact that virtually anyone can now build a cheating tool with little or no coding experience? These tools may also be becoming increasingly difficult for Lichess and Chess.com to detect.

What makes me suspicious is that whenever I play a game that feels particularly unusual, the opponent almost always turns out to have a relatively new account. It's not necessarily that they're winning every single game, but something about the way they play raises questions.

I've been hovering around the 1600 rating range for quite some time, so I'm familiar with the level of play I usually encounter there. Lately, though, some opponents have been playing in ways that feel very different from what I'm used to seeing at this rating.

Some of the games are particularly suspicious, the opponent makes a series of completely nonsensical moves in the first 10 moves, then suddenly starts playing computer-perfect chess for the rest of the game.

It's almost as if they're deliberately trying to take the piss, or to avoid playing 100% engine moves throughout the entire game to make their cheating less obvious.

I know a single game isn't enough to prove anything, but when this pattern keeps showing up, often against relatively new accounts, it's hard not to wonder what's going on.

So I'm wondering, has anyone else noticed a similar trend recently, or could I simply be going through a rough patch and becoming more suspicious than usual?

For my next Lichess extension, which aims to replace the LichessDotCom one I built a few weeks ago, I wanted to add a feature that automatically converts your Lichess rating to its equivalent on Chess.com, directly within the Lichess.

With the help of AI, I ran a study to find a correlation between ratings on both platforms.

You can explore the results, interactive graphs, methodology, and rating conversion tables here:

https://theophile-wallez.github.io/lichess-chesscom-ratings/

I've also made the data and analysis code available on GitHub, so anyone can inspect or reproduce the results.

I'm a FIDE 1700-something player trying to push for 2000. Prepping for OTB tournaments, I kept hitting the same wall: I want to know how players "at my level" actually play — which lines get played between 1700 and 2000, what scores, what's trending this season.

Chess.com and Lichess are great for playing, but neither gives you a local, searchable file of real FIDE OTB games you can sliceby rating band. ChessBase does, but it's Windows-first, and running a VM on Mac to look at one game is absurd.

So I built one. It's called macBase.

• One-click TWIC import — the free weekly archive of real OTB games, 1,600+ issues back to 1994

• Filter by player, Elo band, ECO/opening, event, or issue

• Insights: win/draw/loss by opening for a chosen rating bracket, plus popularity trends across recent issues. This is the part I actually use — it answers "what do 1800s play against the Sicilian this season"

• Stockfish built in, multi-PV, eval bar, arrow drawing, inline notes that get written into standard PGN

• Repertoire folders and spaced-repetition flashcards that keep the arrows you drew

• Everything is a SQLite file and plain PGN on your disk. No account, no cloud,no telemetry — nothing to export later, because it's already open

Six months ago I posted an early version of this here. It was a web app, and I hadn't paid for an Apple developer account yet, so it wasn't signed: some of you couldn't get past Gatekeeper. Someone called it vibecoded. That stung, but the criticism was fair about the result — it wasn't ready.

By any normal measure that thread didn't work. And then something odd happened: 48 people left their email anyway.

What actually brought me back is what happened after. I stopped working on it. Weeks went by, then months — no posts, no updates, nothing from me at all. And people kept signing up. A few every month, all the way through October. When I looked at what they'd written, one of them had answered "what do you like about it" with six words: "a chessbase competitor is badly needed."

Forty-eight strangers waiting on something I'd already half-abandoned is a strange kind of pressure. So I rebuilt it from scratch as a native app, and paid for the developer account this time. It's signed with a Developer ID and notarized, so it opens with a double click instead of a security warning.

What I'm building next, and to be explicit that it does not exist yet: a command line any AI agent can drive — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, whatever you use — so you can ask questions about your own database in plain language and have it run Stockfish locally. Planned for later this year. Today, it is not there, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

Honest limitations:

• Two builds, both signed and notarized: Apple Silicon (macOS 13+) and Intel (macOS 11+, so it covers every Intel Mac that can run Big Sur) • TWIC import needs network; the app itself works offline • No Windows version, and I don't know when — that's a much bigger job than people assume

There's a 7-day trial with no card, and the download is here: https://www.jl-intelligence.net/macbase/

An edit, because something happened while I was writing this.

One of the 48 emailed me. His entire answer on the signup form, six months ago, was three words: "It's for mac!" He wrote to say he wanted to buy a licence — and that he couldn't, because he's on a 2019 iMac and the Apple Silicon build won't launch on it.

So I spent yesterday building the Intel version. It's signed, notarized, and live now. That's the whole reason it exists: one person asked.

If you were one of the 48: thank you for waiting. This is what you were waiting for.

I keep clicking on request computer analysis and nothing happens

I'm willing to pay for them. I bet many are as well. This is a set I had made for me and I used it on the old app before the update. It's a pain to install though. Why can't we have themed sets as an option?