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Better Insights...?

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KevinTheSnipe

I recently upgraded to Diamond, and of course was interested to see what Insights I would find. I now have answers to my most pressing chess questions, like how time of day or day of week affects my accuracy or win-rate (spoiler: it doesn't). 

Also...just kidding. I never wanted that information, it's just useless graphs I have to scroll through looking for something of value. I can't be _too_ critical since the chess.com insights are not substantially better (or, worse) than the ones provided by that other site that'll remain unnamed. 

Anyway, I was hoping I could provide some constructive feedback on what would actually be useful to me as an improving chess player. As far as I know there's no site that really does this well so it's the kind of thing that I'd even be willing to pay more for, if somebody could just get it right. 

Openings

The opening classification and win-rate only goes about 2 moves deep most of the time. This is not particularly helpful, unless I wanted to know if I play 1. e4, or 1. d4, better. Let's assume I have an opening repertoire, and as black I play Alekhine defense. At the bare minimium, I would want to know how I perform in each of the main white tries: Four pawn attack, Chase variation, modern variation, exchange variation, and then there are various setups that involve 2. e5 without playing d4. Because, what I want to know, is which opening lines do I fare worst in. Where should I spend time studying on chessable? Saying I score 50% in the Alekhine defense is a non-statement because thats my entire response to 1. e4, and its expected that it'll be somewhere close to 50% because Im being paired against equally rated opposition. Right? So the lines need to go deeper. It might even make sense to allow user customization so that I can tell you which variations I care about tracking against, and I can tell you what the name of it is. Maybe I'm going to play the exd6 and cxd6 exchange for a while and try to figure out which one suits me better. So I want to see the comparison of results on two exchange variation options.

Also, once I start studying some opening, I want to know if its paying off. So I want to see winrate classified over time. Am I getting better? Am I getting worse? Treading water? Whats the best way to know that? Sure I can look at basic winrate for some period of time, but other metrics might also be useful. For example performance rating can tell me if I outperform my current rating and by how much, in some opening variation. That's useful to know! Or you can tell me if, when I exit the opening, what my average engine eval is. Am I coming out of the opening equal or with +0.5? Perhaps I'm coming out consistently with +1 but then I have a poor winrate! That's not going to be the opening's fault, and that's a very useful insight to know, because it means I need to spend time on the middlegame ideas, and maybe tactics or something, and not the opening per-se.

Exchanging Pieces

Exchanging pieces is an important skill. Do I do a good job of it? What is my accuracy when we talk strictly about captures? This might be a little tricky to nail down because of tactical sequences which isn't what we're trying to measure. We want to see, if I trade knight for bishop here (equal material exchange) who generally gets the better of it?

Material Balance

I'd like to see a classification of the most common material balances in my games, and my accuracy + winrate with those material balances. E.g. how well do I play king endings? How well do I play rook endings? What about knight endings? And R+B vs R+N, what about that? Or Q+R+R vs Q+R+R (heavy piece ending)? 

Time management

How often do I lose on time with a winning position? How often do I blunder under time pressure (however you decide to determine that--could be % of total time in game, to account for things like blitz and bullet etc). E.g. I had a good position, and I would have won, but I gave away a rook with 2 seconds on the clock in a massive blunder. Etc. 

When I do blunder, how much time did I spend thinking? DId I move in less than 1 second with 4 mintues on the clock? Maybe I need to slow down!

Hopefully this gives a sense of how "Insights" can actually provide them, instead of just dumping random data at me that isn't really actionable from an improvement standpoint...

KevinTheSnipe

With regard to openings...you could pretty easily point out where my game follows some GM game or some database line that has more than N games in it. So whatever N is, maybe you say ok at least 10 games, and you have the winrate of that db line. And then, I deviate consistently from that database game continuation, _and_ my win rate is worse than the master database winrate. So that seems like an insight right? "Hey bozo, you can just play this other move in this position you get all the time, and probably get better results. Here's an example game by Bologan that is an example of how to play". Even in the game explorer, to see my games and my winrate with whatever move, and then the database stats for masters. OK I win at 39% rate, but masters win at 60% from here. "Hm...Seems like a red flag, will look into it.". Right?

mathematicaljulian
You can go to the opening explorer if you want your specific stats
KevinTheSnipe
mathematicaljulian wrote:
You can go to the opening explorer if you want your specific stats

If I rephrased what you said, I think you're basically saying "Yes but you can just do the work yourself". That's true, I _can_ figure out my own insights, but its tedious and I was hoping a site that already has the data at its fingertips could possibly present it concisely and easily, providing a real value prop to me as a paying user.