3 Lesser Known Websites to Improve Your Chess Game

When it comes to chess improvement, most players know the "big three": Chess.com, lichess.org and Chessable (especially if you're working on openings or tactics). These platforms are fantastic in their own right but if you're serious about broadening your toolkit, there are some hidden gems out there that don't get nearly the attention they deserve.

In today's post, I want to highlight three lesser-known websites that I've been using and really enjoying lately: qchess.net, Chessalyz.ai and lipuzzle.brendel.xyz. Each of these sites offers something unique that complements the mainstream platforms and in some cases, they even do things better!

Let's dive in.

1. qchess.net – A Treasure Trove of Training Tools

If you’re the kind of player who loves tinkering with different training methods, qchess.net is a dream. It feels like a Swiss Army knife of chess improvement tools with so many features in one place that you can easily lose track of time exploring them all.

From a National Master friend after I told him about the site:

Among a very long list of various tools, my personal favorites are:

• Model Games – Instead of combing through random databases, you’re presented with clean, instructive games that highlight important themes. If you’re trying to learn a new opening or understand a middlegame structure, model games are one of the best ways to see the ideas in action. You can also combine this with the next bullet point!
• Guess-the-Move Trainer – This is probably my favorite tool of the bunch. If you’ve ever wanted to test your instincts against grandmasters then this is the place to do it. You get dropped into real positions and challenged to find the moves that were actually played. It’s both humbling and motivating since you’ll realize quickly how much there is to learn from great players. And the immediate feedback helps you improve your intuition. Even if you don’t guess exactly what was played in the game, your move will be compared to Stockfish’s top move in the position and you will get scored based on whether you matched the game move and whether your move was close to Stockfish’s top recommendation.
• Don’t Hang Your Pieces – This feature is deceptively simple but incredibly practical. You’re presented with positions where one or more of your pieces might be loose and the challenge is to spot the danger before it’s too late. It’s essentially a position trainer that sharpens your ability to notice undefended pieces and avoid the kinds of blunders that derail games. I’ve already created a full Chessable course on this topic (Survive & Thrive: How to Blunder Less and Defend Better) but what I love about the qchess.net trainer is how quick and accessible it is. You can run through a handful of positions in just a few minutes which makes it perfect for a warm-up or a short training session when you don’t have much time.

And those are just three tools out of many. There’s a sense of discovery every time I go to qchess.net. I’ll stumble across a new feature I hadn’t noticed before and suddenly I’ve got another way to sharpen my game.

If your training routine has grown stale then this site will give it a shot of adrenaline.

2. Chessalyz.ai – Learning to Annotate Through Questions

One of the biggest hurdles in chess improvement is figuring out how to analyze your own games. Most players either go too shallow (“oh, I just blundered a rook there, moving on…”) or too deep (“let me turn Stockfish on and see what it says about every single move”). Neither approach really helps you understand the game at a practical level.

That’s where Chessalyz.ai comes in. This site takes a refreshing approach: it teaches you to identify and annotate critical moments in your games by asking the right questions.

Instead of spoon-feeding you answers, Chessalyz.ai prompts you to pause and think about positions with questions like:

• What were you thinking about when you played move “x”?
• Were there any other ideas you considered?

First you click on the “Chessalyz with me!” button on the bottom right of the game analysis page.

Then the magic happens:

After you type your answers to the questions, then you are given feedback on your answer and additional move recommendations. By framing the analysis process around these questions, the site helps you develop a more disciplined and reflective way of looking at your own games. This is much better than just hitting the “game review” button on Chess.com and being told what you did wrong. By analyzing your games this way, over time you’ll start to recognize patterns in your mistakes and thought processes and that’s when real progress happens.

Now, in the spirit of transparency: I should mention that I’m one of the co-founders of Chessalyz.ai, along with my friend Varun (who many of you may know from the Chess Chatter podcast). But the reason I’m including it here isn’t just because I helped create it but instead, it’s because I genuinely believe the question-based approach is a game-changer for players who struggle with self-analysis.

If you’ve ever sat down to review your games and didn’t know what to look for, Chessalyz.ai provides the kind of structure that makes the process both useful and engaging. I’d love if you checked out the website!

3. lipuzzle.brendel.xyz – Training Your Visualization Muscles

If you’re looking for something a little different and want to stretch your mental board visualization, then lipuzzle.brendel.xyz is worth bookmarking.

The site is built around lichess.org’s puzzle database, but with a twist: instead of starting right at the tactical moment, the puzzle begins a few moves earlier. That means you have to visualize the moves leading up to the tactic before you can execute it.

At first, this can feel frustrating since you’re so used to being dropped directly into the “aha!” moment. But once you settle into the rhythm, you realize how powerful this exercise is. Visualization is one of those undertrained skills that separates strong players from the rest. Being able to clearly see positions a few moves ahead without moving the pieces is a massive advantage in real games. Nick Vasquez has written about this as well in his Substack article here (about half-way through the post).

Here’s an example of how the lipuzzle site works: instead of immediately calculating a knight sacrifice on f7, lipuzzle might make you visualize and play out two preparatory moves first. You need to keep track of the shifting position in your head and then recall where the tactic lands. You can also adjust the number of moves you have to visualize ahead in the settings.

It’s hard work, but it’s exactly the kind of training that pays dividends in practical play. Think of it like resistance training at the gym where you’re adding weight to the exercise. By making your training tough, this means that everything feels lighter and easier when you get to the board.

For players serious about sharpening their calculation and visualization skills, lipuzzle.brendel.xyz is one of the best niche tools I’ve seen.

Wrapping Up

The chess improvement world is full of resources and it’s easy to get overwhelmed or stuck using the same platforms over and over again. That’s why I love discovering sites like qchess.net, Chessalyz.ai, and lipuzzle.brendel.xyz. Each one fills a different niche:

qchess.net for its variety of training tools, especially model games, guess-the-move and don’t hang your pieces.

Chessalyz.ai for teaching you how to meaningfully annotate your games through guided questions.

lipuzzle.brendel.xyz for strengthening your visualization by pushing you to calculate moves before the tactic appears.

Of course, none of these sites are meant to replace the heavyweights like lichess or Chess.com but they don’t need to. Instead, they offer complementary ways to train that can freshen up your study routine and target areas that often go neglected.

If you’re serious about improvement, I’d encourage you to give each of them a try. Even spending a few minutes a day rotating through these tools can make your training feel more engaging and purposeful.

And who knows, you might just find yourself reaching for these “hidden gems” more often than the mainstream platforms.