I enjoy chess, and play on both chess.com and lichess.org. I am a paying member of both.
I engage in games throughout the day to relax, sometimes to pass time, or for a mental challenge. Sometimes I even do it to basically assess my own mental fitness. If I’m feeling worn down and tired, I’ll play to truly assess how diminished I am at the time.
I am a mediocre player, and this long challenged my self-worth. I have this problem that growing up the “smart kid” cursed me with intellectual laziness, where I got the internalized value that if I have to exert effort thinking about something, I’ve failed.
This is not a boast. It is a massive personal failing, and it is one that I’ve worked hard to try to correct. Trying to force myself to stop and think is a massive challenge. It was one of the biggest reasons I forced myself into chess, though it has been an extremely hard battle.
So recently I built a tool to analyze my own chess play. And now, I’m sharing it with you.
This takes real resources to operate, so there is a small fee to run a report, though note that if you invite friends you can earn extra reports (available under the user icon in the upper right after logging in). Use those reports to monitor your progress over time as you master openings, and become more aware of the threats that end up costing you games.
This also helped mellow me a bit as I often had a feeling my opponents were cheating (my carelessness meaning their attacks seemed to come from nowhere, and thus seeming inhuman and suspect), but some engine detection that I built into this comforted me that I was fully losing on my own accord. I was just getting outplayed.
Through the analysis that I built for this, my ELO has improved 400+ over the past two weeks. I am not making this up, and the pattern continues trending up. The primary value has been identifying not only the situations where I need to stop, reassess and spend more time than the 3s I normally do, but also openings that I not only fail at performing myself, but opponent openings that I was extremely vulnerable to, especially the Queens Pawn Opening where I was losing 70%+ of games as black.
Hopefully this helps someone improve their game, and I just look to get enough return from it that I’m not in the red paying for the domain name.
Cheers!