Chess repertoire tool
This is a copy of a post I did on medium: https://medium.com/me/stats/post/ae93d7b75760
I don’t like learning chess openings. But I also don’t like clawing my way back from the bad positions I routinely get from my poor opening play. So I have finally accepted that I need to put some work into this area of my chess game. I want to keep this effort as focused (minimal) as possible though - no memorising variations that I never get to actually play!
Chess Lens
There are plenty of excellent sources of information about openings, and great sites to play on (like this one!), but nothing that really bridges the gap between the two. How can I use the games that I’ve played to help me focus my efforts on the variations that I actually face at my level?
For example, if I’ve purchased a course on the Sicilian Najdorf there are going to many many variations covered which I could spend time learning. My opponents aren’t GMs, playing the top lines though. I want something which tells me which moves from that course I’m most likely to face.
On the other side of it, how am I tracking against what I want to learn? I’ve just played a bunch of blitz games, did I manage to stick to the variations covered in the course or not. How well did I do with the variations I chose to focus on?
To try address these issues I’ve developed a tool called Chess Lens. You can try it out at https://chesslens.app.
Describing what you want to learn
In Chess Lens you describe what you want to learn using repertoires, which is just a collection of chess variations and notes. You can use whatever you want as the source of moves for a repertoire. It could be a Chessable course, a Gotham Chess Youtube video or a Lichess study.
You can setup as many repertoires as you want. This helps keeps things targeted and easy to manage. It also helps keeps practice focused as well:
Practicing inside Chess Lens
Once you’ve setup your repertoire you can practice it inside Chess Lens. Just got to the “Practice” tab on the repertoire page and click start. You play your repertoire move from the current position, and Chess Lens will pick one of the replies you’ve setup. This continues (hopefully) until the end of the variation.
Youtube videos
Chess Lens has indexed thousands of Youtube videos. This means that Chess Lens knows which videos talk about the current position, but also where in the video this happens. Meaning it can take you right to the moment where an expert is talking about your position.
Most places where there is a board Chess Lens also has the option to see related Youtube videos.
How are you tracking?
To see how you’re tracking against your repertoire Chess Lens provides several tools.
Importing your games
Chess Lens imports your games regularly from your account (Lichess or chess.com). They are then analysed, comparing them with your repertoire and standard opening theory. We also see what an engine makes of them.
Weekly summaries
Chess Lens looks at your games for a given week and give you a summary of how you’ve done. This includes a break down per opening, and positions where you could have played better. Both in the opening, and missed opportunities later in the game as well. These positions are presented as problems, for example the screenshot below shows an opening position where I played the wrong move.
Opening summaries
Chess Lens also shows you your performance per opening. This includes both a win / loss / draw percent, and a rating based on your games in that opening. The rating is useful since your win percentage might stay the same, but your opponents are actually getting harder.
You can also click on one of these to see how you do in different variations. The Caro-Kann looks OK in the above graph, but drilling in we can see a big gap:
With a win percentage of 25% vs 67% and 71% for other variations I need to do something about the Two Knights Attack!
Other features
In addition to the above features Chess Lens also supports:
- Importing games from PGN — this is handy if you play a game over the board and want to include it in your stats in Chess Lens
- Search and view your games by opponent, opening etc
Try it out
Chess Lens is currently being beta tested and is free to use. All the features described above are available for you to try out right now at: https://chesslens.app
I would really appreciate your feedback so I can make it the most useful tool possible. User feedback is why the PGN import feature is there, and why you’ll soon be able to import Lichess studies automatically.
Thanks for reading!
