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ChessMonitor – Analytics for Lichess and Chess.com (chessmonitor.com)
111 points by seabass-labrax on Sept 15, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 24 comments



The creator's Show HN:, 8 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34246718


Hi everyone, author here. Please let me know if you have feedback or questions.


Ahh, this is super nice!

One thing I'd love to know or see is common mistakes I make or the type of mistake/trap I fall into in the pivotal moments of games (some kind of fork/pin combo for me I suspect) ... and/or repeated mistakes I've made in the same position.


I'm currently not doing Stockfish evaluations (everything is based on simple win/loss-rate) but I hope I'm able to integrate this in the future. Then I can show much more in-depth statistics like the one you mention.


The scroll feature to rewind/forward moves on a game, with syncing the state in the URL, is just awesome.

Do you mind sharing how it's done? I just published a library [1] that deals with syncing complex state in the URL, and I'd love to hear more about actual use-cases in the wild.

[1] https://github.com/47ng/next-usequerystate


Thanks, I just like it when all state is in the URL and you can just bookmark it. Also using the browser back/forward button should work well thanks to that. I'll check out your library!

My code for that is rather simple. I'm using Next.js and the code looks something like this (a little simplified):

  const router = useRouter(); // get the router/location object
  const information = useFetch({ position: router.query.position }); // fetch information from the server
  
  function changeChessPosition(newPosition) { // called when position changes
      router.replace({ query: { postition: newPosition } }); // replaces the state in the URL
  }
In addition, I have some caching in place so that each position is only downloaded once and the change function looks a little more complicated in my case as there are multiple values that can be change for each page.


It seems like Lichess already has most of the features on the site; they have a better UI on ChessMonitor though.

The main killer feature I see is combining multiple accounts. Are there any other features didn't notice?


There are many similar features. Overall the UI on ChessMonitor is much more focused on statistics.

Another key feature Lichess does not have, is the Openings page. It is very powerful when used correctly. You can look at your openings and immediately see for which openings you might need to consume more theory (or which you should not play at all).

Here is an example: https://www.chessmonitor.com/u/cdPiOkUArRJ7shVNJcT3/openings...


Would like to see Chess960 variant stats.

Classic chess are way too predictable and players who've managed to learn popular openings have an advantage. Chess960 fixes that.

And due to comparably low popularity of Chess960 I often play it with Stockfish. It has several difficulty levels which are a convenient tool for practice.

So it would be nice to include games with bots (checkbox?) on ChessMonitor as well.


I'm aware of Chess960, but this will probably never be supported on ChessMonitor for three reasons: First, Chess960 basically tries to prevent players from preparing (by having a random starting position) which does not align well with providing statistics. Second, it would require major UI and storage changes on ChessMonitor (like adding an option to select the starting position to compare games). And third, Chess960 is simply not as popular amongst non-professional chess players.


How many combinations are there for Chess960?

I'm wondering whether people could also prepare for it if it became popular.


There's 960 of them. Hence, the name.

Slight nuance: the 960 figure includes the regular starting position, and there's some variation in different tournaments about what would happen if the classical starting position were selected. So, at least in some tournaments, it's actually Chess959. But I guess that has less of a ring to it.


This is the most beautiful site I've seen in years.

My only criticism is the search box's height seems to be a few pixels shorter than the search button.

Do you write about design or development anywhere, or have a GitHub profile? I didn't see anything linked in your profile here.


Rating estimate came within 30 points of my current FIDE rating. Shockingly accurate!


Thanks for the feedback! Always good to hear from chess players with a FIDE rating that it's working :)

If anyone wants more info on how this works, check out this post with more details: https://www.chessmonitor.com/blog/2023-elo-calculation


I’d suggest fitting an isotonic regression instead. I think it’s a reasonable expectation that online and FIDE ratings are monotonically related but it seems unlikely to me that they are linearly related even though it may be an ok approximation for players in a particular rating range.

I suspect that the online population — especially at lower ratings — is significantly different to the over the board population. I also expect — especially in the FIDE case — that ratings stratify the players into hobbyists, serious amateurs, professionals, etc and so different FIDE rating ranges are likely to scale to online ratings differently.

All of the above should be implicitly accounted for in an isotonic regression so long as monotonicity holds globally. You can easily do it with sklearn and I suspect it may give you better results.


Thanks, I'll look into this!


Feature suggestion: I've been looking for a long time for something that will look through my games and tell me if I've ever made a bad move twice from an identical position.


The site's aesthetic is shockingly similar to Dotabuff (dotabuff.com), which is a nice design in both cases. Any relation to it?


That is where some of the inspiration came from. Years ago, I was an avid Dota player and always loved Dotabuff (and OpenDota, too).


Feature suggestions: - Identify openings when in explorer mode - Filter explorer by player rating


Both features are already on my TODO list. That doesn't mean they are coming soon, though... ;)


How does this compare to aim chess?


What does this add on top of the default Lichess chess insights?




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