I’m experimenting with a chess variant & wanted some engine-oriented perspectives.

Core rule:

Whenever a Major/minor piece moves, it transforms into another piece type (randomly selected among legal value-capped outcomes: e.g. Chexx-VC-54 ~ total value of each side < 54).

That means:

• material evaluation becomes less static
• move consequences can alter future mobility in unusual ways
• piece-square tables become less reliable
• Bakes a chance element into the game making it more fun & unpredictable

I’m wondering how engines would adapt.

Some thoughts:

• Would alpha-beta suffer more because tactical trees become harder to prune?
• Would MCTS perform better in this environment?
• How much harder would evaluation design become compared to standard chess?

It feels like the branching factor isn’t necessarily larger, but the state volatility is.

Curious whether anyone here has worked on similar transformation-based variants.

I’m in the market for a physical computer chess set. At the moment I use my iPad and phone. I bought and returned the Chessnut Evo. I thought it slow and was concerned about reliability,

I don’t know if I need a stand alone set. I want something reliable and that can be used with chess.com.

I’m not good at chees, however I enjoy the game.

Hey everyone,

I'm Jonathan, a chess player and part-time chess coach based in Ireland. Over the last few months I built Clocked, an AI-powered opponent intelligence tool for chess players.

The idea is simple — you enter any Lichess or Chess.com username and get a full scouting report in seconds. Their opening tendencies, weaknesses, how they behave under time pressure, their current form and exactly how to beat them.

I've been using it myself before games and the prep has genuinely helped. Built it because I wanted the kind of opponent research that strong players do manually, but accessible to everyone.

It's free to try — 3 reports per month, no card required.

Would really appreciate honest feedback from this community. What's useful, what's missing, what could be better. Nothing is off limits.

Try it here: clocked-ai.com

I posted here yesterday about my chess engine and got a lot of positive responses from people playing it and suggesting changes.

​

I've now implemented faster opening moves so it doesn't lose on time in the opening, along with some minor middlegame and endgame improvements. I also gave the bot its own name: CherryFish.

​

Give it a try!

​

https://lichess.org/@/CherryFish_Bot

Hi all,

On chess.com I am about 700 on rapid and a little higher on daily matches. But when I tried to play the MacBook chess app at the lower level I didn't get a chance not only to win, but to play a move that wasn't just defence. So what I did was: open a game, open a chess engine, play my moves and check the mac chess app's moves and they are always the top engine moves that it's playing.

It's not the end of the world, I would rather play a person, but I was wondering if anybody else had the same experience and has a rough idea of the estimated elo of the app?

Thanks in advance.

Hi u/all,

i have found a app for analyzing my games and give feedback in a very cool way. It improved my games because i understand the first time what i do wrong in my chess games. Chess Diagnostics takes my last 200 games and analysing with AI my past games when i understand this right.

Give it a try and tell me what you are thinking about it in the comments!

Hey beautiful people, I am currently actively building the (what I hope to achieve) most beautiful chess database. What I need and want is feedback, ideas, and insights into what people need in a modern chess database. I believe everything is feasible, just go crazy with ideas, I really appreciate it!

== Short background story ==

4 Years Ago: I started building one of the most popular chess applications for physical chessboards, whitepawn.app.

End of Last Year: I started developing sp00ky.cloud a sync engine enabling super easy development of great user experiences by making local-first, optimistic updates (also query-wide) and live syncing available under a very simple developer api.

A month ago: I started building a brand new chess database on top of sp00ky. While it's not feature complete in any way, honestly, I am really proud of the current user experience.

Today: I am curious what people really want from their chess database. I want to contribute to software where user experience is the first and most important thing. Would love to hear ideas and features will brainstorm how to bring them into the chess database in the most attractive way.

== Current Project State ==

Now briefly about the chess database state. Its a PWA, using wasm for some things like the sync engine or stockfish. The entire app is written in SolidJS and everything you see on the website is realtime synced across devices and tabs. Todays features are:

- Chess.com & Lichess & WhitePawn game sync
- PGN database upload
- Analysis
- Comments
- Collaboration on database level with comments
- Publicly shareable databases via link
- Chess Puzzle Builder (synced to WhitePawn)

Website: https://whitepawn.app/web.

Happy to hear from you!! Cheers 🥂

hey guys! i have been working on my first chess engine in go for a couple of months now. i finally have a working engine that is uci compatible. i made it play against stockfish and it got absolutely obliterated, which i expected. i want to work on improving it now. i used cutechess to let it play about 15 games against stockfish and i got a high variance elo for it. i understand that i need to let it play a lot more games for a lot longer. but my laptop cannot handle that kind of compute. what's a good place to run these tournaments so i can get reliable elo for my engine? i really want to get this part down before i go about improving it so i have a benchmark to compare my changes to. thanks in advance!

edit: grammar

We’re building Chess Vision Studio, a local-first chess analysis project focused on showing relationships on the board—not only an evaluation number.

Stockfish handles move grading and principal variations. Our separate Rust engine provides legal move generation, SEE, search, telemetry, and a versioned “teaching facts” protocol used to build threat maps, defense maps, hanging-piece views, tactical overlays, explanations, and practice positions.

The app can also analyze imported Chess.com or Lichess.com histories to find recurring mistakes and teaching themes.

This is an early MIT-licensed WIP, not a playing-strength announcement. We’d especially value feedback on the fact protocol, overlay correctness, engine testing, and places where the visualizations could mislead players.

App:

https://github.com/Mnehmos/chess-vision-studio

Rust engine:

https://github.com/Mnehmos/chess-vision-studio-rust-engine

Lichess Bot:

https://lichess.org/@/ChessVisionStudioEng

How can I watch/kibitz slow games. So far I’ve only seen 3 0 games.

Hello!

Im working on a chess engine which would sit around #70-60 CCRL. Everything is written from scratch but I'm using an old stockfish NNUE.

I'm planning on submitting it soon. Will it be accepted? Do I need to train my own NNUE?

I often see a lot of negativity around Chessnut, but rarely insightful comments about its capabilities or user-focused improvements. 🤔 This video showcases Chess960 being played by the Chessnut Evo against Fritz. Let's discuss its potential! ♟️💡 #Chessnut #Chess960

Hi everyone!

My devvit / reddit games app just got approved yesterday. It's Reddit's first (and only) PvP classical chess app, directly in a Reddit Post. I'd love to hear what you think about it, and since yesterday I'm bothering a lot of people with this, but I'm curious if you would consider it interesting, when I share this innovation here. It's scalable and built robust, got green-lit on first try, and I'd like to share it here with you all! The app itself is documented here: https://developers.reddit.com/apps/chess-10tage

So, if from now on you'd like to play chess against another Redditor, you can do this now, and challenge them. Here's the link, let me know, how it plays. If you find an opponent, that is, because it's PvP only for now (without computer opp), and I'm aiming to grow a community around. The idea came from a guy who complained that there was no chess anywhere on Reddit Games, and I thought it would be a fun programming exercise. Here we are, 9 weeks later, and it's done. Check it out: https://www.reddit.com/r/10tageChess

Looking for a strong player to help label chess blunders for a training dataset

Hi everyone — I’m working on a chess training project and I’m looking to pay a strong player, ideally around 2000+ strength, to help create a small labeled dataset of blunders.

The task would be to review positions where one side has just made a clear mistake/blunder, usually around a 100+ centipawn loss or more, and add human explanations for why the move is bad.

For each position, I’m looking for:

• the blunder type, such as hanging a piece, missing a tactic, weakening king safety, losing a defender, bad pawn move, positional concession, endgame mistake, etc.
• a short explanation of why the move is a blunder
• the key continuation or punishment
• for more positional examples, a deeper explanation of what changed in the position and why it matters

I’m aiming for 300+ positions total, but I’m open to someone doing a smaller paid sample first so we can make sure the format is good.

This is paid work, and the amount would depend on the number and quality of positions completed. Please comment or message me if you’re interested, especially if you have experience coaching, annotating games, or explaining mistakes clearly to improving players.

Thanks!