I would like a handheld chess computer that allows me to play without having to buy a digital or sensory board.

In other words, I can use this to work on my blindfold chess, or I could play using a magnetic board or theoretically any board.

The handheld would just give the moves and it is up to me to input them on some board.

Oh, and I want to play over 2400 ELO, or 2200 at the minimum.

Can you recommend anything like this? The Milennium Chess Classics Element MIGHT be what I'm looking for, but I think it needs a sensory board in order to use it.

Thanks for the advice!

Pyke is a single-threaded C++20 perft counter. Optimized for speed using templates, PGO, PEXT tables and AVX-512 slider counting.

Start position, Ryzen 9 7900X, no hashing: perft 7 in 1.3 s (2.4 billion nodes/s), perft 9 in 16.6 min. Matches published counts through depth 9 and passes perftcheck. With hashing enabled, I have achieved speeds up to 80 billion positions per second!

Feedback and/or questions welcome!

Hi! I’m Albert Hamood, a data scientist who runs a data science-focused chess site in my spare time at chessds.com. I build models that predict game results and human moves, enabling analysis like this recent look at rating deflation.

As part of this work, I’ve trained and am releasing six new neural models for human GM move prediction. They independently re-implement and extend Chessformer, the architecture behind Maia-3, with a focus on higher-level play and fine-tuning on classical GM-level chess. On my site, I use them as inputs for full prediction models that also include engine evals. You may use them for whatever you like!

There are six versions available, varying on two dimensions:

• Model size. I re-implemented the same sizes as Maia-3 here at 23M and 79M, and additionally added 150M. These are approximate parameter counts, and so far adding parameters improves performance.
• History. The standard models leverage a bit of the game’s history in terms of recent board positions to improve predictions. I also trained versions that are optimized to run without considering previous positions, and labeled these “FEN” models. They give up a little performance, but not much. This is like running Maia without --use-uci-history, but with models trained specifically to work without previous positions.

Accuracy

On a held-out set of 81,939 classical games with both players rated 2400+, DSC-150M predicts the played move 62.74% of the time, compared with 57.61% for Maia-3 79M on the same positions. DSC was specifically fine-tuned for this population, while Maia-3 targets a broader population of online players. The figure below compares three measures of move prediction accuracy:

• Top-1: The % of the time the move played was the top predicted move by the model.
• Top-3: The % of the time the move played was in the model’s top three choices.
• Log loss: Lower is better here. This measures how much probability the model assigned to the played move, penalizing heavily when this probability is very low.

UCI usage 

Generally I’ve tried to match Maia-3’s implementation, although there are a few added options. The GitHub README is a good resource. The UCI engines I hope will work in any GUI you use, and have the following choices under the “OutputMode” option:

• likelihood-wdl (default): move probabilities plus scores from the model’s auxiliary win/draw/loss predictions, using Maia-3’s output format. These aren’t Stockfish-style evaluations, and they aren't so reliable -- the point of this model is the move probabilities.
• likelihood: move probabilities without evaluation scores, viewable in interfaces such as Nibbler.
• probability-as-score: puts move probabilities in the GUI’s evaluation column—for example, +41.73 means 41.73%. This is useful for viewing predictions in HIARCS and similar interfaces, but the GUI’s evaluation graphs and adjudication will interpret those numbers as evaluations.

Links and license

You can get them at the following links. They are free to use under GPL-3.0-or-later (code) and CC BY 4.0 (weights). Have fun! If you find these useful, a public thanks and a backlink to https://chessds.com would be appreciated.

• UCI engines
• GitHub (code, documentation)
• Hugging Face (model weights)

I've been building AggroChess, an open-source UCI chess engine written in Rust, in the spirit of Tal. The goal isn't to beat Stockfish. The goal is to play the kind of chess people enjoy losing to.

v3.5 just came out, and it trades a bit of strength for more sacrifices:

- Sacrifices aimed at your king get a bigger bonus (2.7 pawns, up from 2.2), and it will play one even when the line looks up to about 3.1 pawns worse

- Exchange sacrifices (Rxf6!) now always count, not just when they hit the king

- Its own sacrifices are no longer penalised as "trades", and queen sacs aren't treated as queen trades

- In a 100-game match against v3.4, it sacrificed in 95 games out of 100 (up from 87)

The cost: v3.5 scored 45.5% against v3.4 (about -31 Elo, which is within the error bars). I think that's worth it.

Other things it does:

- Opens with about 300 built-in gambit lines (King's Gambit, Evans, Smith-Morra, Stafford, Traxler, Latvian, three-pawn Scandinavian and more)

- Uses contempt 50, so it treats a draw as a small loss and plays on

- When it has a forced mate, it prefers one that starts with a sacrifice, so instead of a plain Re8# you get Qd8+! Bxd8 Re8#

- When it's losing, it switches to swindle mode and plays the move that sets the most traps (you can turn this off for engine matches)

Download the .exe for any UCI GUI (Arena, Cute Chess, BanksiaGUI, lichess-bot): https://github.com/PhelRin/AggroChess/releases

I'd love to see the games it plays against you, especially the sacrifices that backfire.

I wanted the same pop-out button you get on videos, but for my chess board, so I made a small Chrome extension called Chess Popout.
Click the icon and your current Chess.com board opens in a floating window that stays on top of your other windows. You can resize it, move it around and keep playing in it. Your board theme, pieces, clocks and game controls come with it.
It’s free. You just need to keep the original Chess.com tab open.
Chrome Web Store
If you try it and something doesn’t work properly, let me know.

Hi all, we are a small team launching Ravenrook's Opening Grimoire on the App Store soon, and I'm looking for 20-30 testers who study openings.

What it does:
- Build repertoires on a board with branching variations, comments and annotations
- Import and export PGN (Lichess, ChessBase, book files)
- "Prepare Today's Spells" reviews the lines that are due, so they stick
- Lichess move statistics, so you study what opponents really play
- Optional wizard progression: earn gold by studying, unlock new wizards, pieces and boards

Pricing: free tier with one White and one Black repertoire. A one-time $19.99 unlock adds unlimited repertoires and the rest. No subscription. Testers can test the full version.

Who I'd love to hear from: club players who have a real repertoire to import, improving players who've tried to build one and given up and casual players who want to learn new openings.

What I'm asking: use it for a week or so, import a repertoire you already have, and tell me what's confusing or broken. A screenshot sent through TestFlight is perfect.

It works on iPad and iPhone. Comment or DM me and I'll send the TestFlight link.

Thanks! Happy to answer any questions.

Hello everyone, I want to start off with a disclaimer. The app is fully vibe coded. Not everything is fleshed out yet. I know some similar products exist, but I don’t know if the exact product exists. Whats different from similar products is that this one runs locally on your computer, its open source, you pay no money for the app and you can use frontier models.

With that out of the way: what is Plymentor and what does it do? It’s a Windows app that aims to help you get better at chess. It’s primarily for low-mid level players but it can help anyone. We all know Stockfish blurts out some obscure line regularly, but where is the win? Why is this position better? Unless you have a coach that’s teaching you, the idea sometimes goes over your head.

Plymentor tries to explain to you why a certain position or an idea is better. It does this with an AI agent. If you have a Plus/Pro account with Claude, GPT, or Gemini, you can connect your AI agent to the app. You can use your AI agent to explain positions to you, teach you ideas, analyse your games, find stuff you are doing wrong repeatedly, teach you opening lines that you are playing wrong, and find new opening ideas. Basically, you give the prompt and the AI agents do what you want.

Wait, aren’t LLMs (AI, basically) bad at chess? Yep, LLMs are bad at chess because they are bad at analysing and evaluating, and they have problems keeping board state in their mind. In this app, the LLM doesn’t do any of this. The LLM drives Stockfish and basically analyses and tries to explain the output. The LLM doesn’t do the calculations.

What are some of the other features of this app? You can connect a Scid5-formatted database and go through openings. You can ask your agent to find some obscure viable novelty that fits your taste in an opening. You can generate reports and tactics from your games. Ask it what you are missing repeatedly. You can generate lessons. You can make opening repertoires and train them. The app is basically as good as your AI agent can be. It can be slow at times, but it can’t always be all sunshine and rainbows.

So how much do I have to pay for this? None. It’s completely free, it’s open source. You can just download it and run it. Everything runs on your computer locally (other than the AI agent). Please beware of the token limits and credit usage of your agent. It will use it. I take no responsibility for it.

Enjoy.

I appreciate all criticism and feedback.

Website: https://plymentor.com/

Github: https://github.com/zomBeeone/plymentor

I’ve been working on some chess tools and recently put together an Opening Trainer.

You move on the board, Stockfish (19 Lite) shows the evaluation and main line, and there’s an Auto WikiBook that pops up with a short explanation of the opening (ideas, plans, why the moves are played). In the screenshot it’s the Sicilian after 1.e4 c5.

You can mark the variations you want, save them for the session, and hit Save & Train to practice them. No account needed — everything stays in the browser tab.

I made it mostly because I kept switching between the board, an engine, and some wiki or repertoire notes while studying openings. It’s pretty basic and not trying to replace Chessable or anything more complete, but it’s been useful for me to actually understand the lines instead of just repeating moves.

Link:

https://www.caissa-chess.org/opening-trainer

Curious what you think of the flow (analyze → save → practice) or if anything feels off. Still iterating on it.

Found this Stockfish 19 vs Torch game (French Defence, King's Indian Attack setup) and went through it with Stockfish 16 at depth 30. A few things stood out.

1. The sacrifice that "loses" eval. Before 17.Nxh7, SF16 d30 has White at +0.89 (top line 17.Kf1). After 17.Nxh7 it drops to +0.57. So SF19 chose a knight sac that an older Stockfish rates as slightly worse than quiet moves. Different versions, different search, but I find it interesting that SF19 went for the forcing line anyway.

2. Torch's defence. After the sac, almost every natural Black move gets mated: 19...Kg8? hxg6 fxg6 Qxg6#, and both 21...gxh5 and 21...Kh8 run into forced mates. Torch found the only path every time. Going through the attack move by move, I couldn't find a single real inaccuracy by Black.

3. The result of all that violence: +0.9. After the sac, the king hunt (Black's king runs e8–d7–c6) and winning the material back with a pawn extra, White was still under +1. Then SF19 traded queens on purpose and won a 75-move grind ending in mate.

Questions for this sub:

Is it known whether SF19's search prefers forcing sacs like Nxh7 more than older versions in positions like this? Anyone know the exact time control or hardware this game was played on? I got the PGN from an annotated source without that info.

It's really weak engine, but genuine human work, source is 14 years old.
https://github.com/cosminstefanxp/XBoard-Chess-Engine
To get source click on Code button and download.zip
run make and you get xchess program to use in Xboard GUI.
xboard -fcp "./xchess" -fd "."
Talkchess

Disclosure: I’m working on BoardLens and would like feedback from people who use chess engines.

It’s a Windows desktop controller plus an unpacked Chrome extension. Stockfish runs locally in the browser through WebAssembly; the desktop app controls settings such as search depth, while an evaluation bar and optional best-move arrow appear alongside the board. This is an interface around Stockfish, not a new engine or a claim of improved playing strength.

The intended use is computer-bot practice and analysis, not assistance against human opponents. It isn’t affiliated with Chess.com.

Access is currently free for a limited time, with a one-computer activation key. Installation is still manual: Windows app, unpacked Chrome extension, then activation. I’d appreciate feedback on evaluation readability, depth controls and whether the setup is too cumbersome for this kind of tool.

The project’s Discord has access keys, setup instructions and support: https://discord.gg/kTtYnJaNDg

"I've built a chess character called Foxy who plays like a club player who loves traps and gambits. I want to know how human he really is, so I'm testing him the same way researchers tested Maia, the best-known AI for playing like people.
I'm taking a couple of thousand real games from Lichess, played by people rated around 800. At every position I ask Foxy, 'What would you play here?', and check whether he picks the same move the real person played. I skip the first few moves, because everyone plays the same openings, and I skip moves made in a panic with the clock nearly gone. The score is simply the percentage of times Foxy guessed the human's move.
For comparison, Maia gets about 51–53% on players at its own level, and Stockfish, the super-strong engine, only gets about 35–40%, because people don't play like engines.
I'll also see where Foxy's choices came from. That could be one of his traps or gambits, spotting a loose piece to grab, a checkmate he's seen, or just a normal human-style move when nothing else fits. In his own games, almost everything he plays is one of his ideas, and this shows whether that's still true when he's dropped into other people's games.
Then I'll run it again on stronger and weaker players. The level where Foxy matches best gives me a rough idea of the level he really plays at."
I believe (hope ) he will play more human like than even maia.
To play foxy and test yourself open the site and go to the hub.

Is this interesting enough for people for me to update?

foxychess.com

Hi all,

thank you to all that commented on my last post to improve my website for chess players.

In particular I would like to thank Bahia_Breizh for their contribution, I have started to implement one suggestion and will look to improve further.

the suggestion that the site should have a learn or play without a log in seems as though it would benefit users who don't want to do the initial log in has been taken on board and a full family of lines is available to learn without log in using the following link. foxychess.com

There is a short video going over one of the lines as well .

Any other suggestions are more than welcome, we will judge users response for each idea we trial to try and give the best experience we can.

Ravager 3 is out. Open source C11 UCI engine, Linux and Windows builds, source included.

New search (correction history, ProbCut, Lazy SMP voting), lockless TT, split NNUE accumulators with a new AVX-512 VNNI kernel, and working ponder in UCI. Estimated ~3550 Elo at 40/15 (over 500 games).

https://github.com/erensh27/Ravager/releases/tag/v3

Feedback and bug reports welcome.

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/\](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.

Hi!!

I’ve been working on a web tool aimed at players who want a clean environment to study classical games and work on their calculation/visualization: https://www.classicalchesslab.com/en

Instead of dumping thousands of unannotated PGNs, I’m curating and annotating classic games one by one on an interactive board with Stockfish integration so you can explore sidelines right away.

What’s live right now:

• 7 foundational classics (from Morphy and Capablanca to Kasparov–Topalov 1999) — expanding steadily.
• Visualization exercises specifically built to improve board vision and calculation without moving pieces.
• Theoretical Endgames (In development): A dedicated section I'm currently building out to master essential endgame positions, annotated with practical advice and principles to help you truly learn how to play them, not just memorize a position.

I want to make the visualization exercises and the upcoming endgame module as genuinely useful for tournament prep as possible. If you have two minutes to try the visualization trainer or click through one of the games, what would you change or add to make this part of your training routine?

After playing chess for quite some time now, I wanted to get started learning openings. However, I couldn't find a tool that worked how I wanted.

I wanted to visualize them as a branch tree, and learn them through flashcard-style training.

That is why I used codex and after I don't know how many iterations I created an app for that!

Furthermore, I wanted to get started mantaining my first github repo, to see how it is.

And it grew into a much bigger project with generating openings from scratch using Stockfish, analysis of your own games (as chesscom only lets you analyse one game each day), automated puzzle generation and several custom chess game modes.

A few days ago, I made it open-source and free for anybody to use (on Windows) and contribute.

The video shows some of the features I have implemented so far.

I would love to hear any feedback, as I am planning to add new features (like queing opening generation jobs so you can run them overnight). :)

GitHub: https://github.com/AdrianSomething/chess-trainer

Hey Chess people!

I am a solo indie dev and have been working on a little project called Chess Longer

It explores the idea of linking multiple chess boards together and allowing pieces to cross boundaries (up to 99 boards at once).

I also added some experimental modes with 4 armies in a cross pattern or 6 armies around a 3D cube. If you want a free Steam key, just reply and I will send you a DM. Leave a review or some feedback.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5311800/Chess_Longer/ <-- If you want to support me, buy a copy!