[chessroots]

Using the Lichess Database containing every live Lichess game ever played, we created a website to visualize chess openings. Each move on the graph is colored by the average Lichess rating of a player who makes it, you can use the graph to visualize several games at once and find transpositions between games. Transpositions are particularly interesting on a graph as they can be hard to spot otherwise.

You can see data from players similar to you by filtering the graph by Elo or time control. If you are interested in really high rated games you can swap the database and see tournament games with >2000 Elo from the Kingbase dataset, or to go even higher you can view a dataset from chess engines playing each other. It can be surprising how different the graph looks in tournament games compared to even high rated Lichess games, to swap or filter the dataset click the graph button at the top of the screen.

If you want to see the opening from a specific game on the graph you can use the "Trace Game" feature, then you can paste a PGN in, or if you are a Lichess player you can grab games from your Lichess account. To find a position you are interested in you can click search and enter it into a chessboard.

[charmides]

When I first looked at the website, I thought that it looked like a nice student assignment or a weekend project. But seeing that you are already attempting to monetize this website and that you are treating this somewhat seriously, I have to tell you that your software is lightyears behind the chess opening modules of professional chess software such as ChessBase 15 or Chess Assistant 12.

https://en.chessbase.com/post/announcing-grand-chessbase-15-...

https://chessok.com/?page_id=19894

[robbiemitchell]

This costs £2 per month, while ChessBase 15 costs anywhere from €119.90 to €469.90 and Chess Assistant costs €59.96.

[cepth]

I can't speak to Chess Assistant, but as a longtime Chessbase owner/user, it lets you:

* Search any database (proprietary or freely downloaded) for games matching positions (partial position matches too)

* Quiz yourself on openings; e.g. the actual memorization of the move orders, which I don't believe ChessRoots is showing

* Generate endless tactics problems to drill on

* Generate annotations for games; e.g. branching moves, variations, text comments etc.

* Graphical markup of positions, to show tactics like pins, skewers, forks, etc.

* ChessBase gives you a perpetual license. You can upgrade if you think new versions are worth it (they usually aren't). I happily used ChessBase 9 for several years before upgrading to 14.

It's really not a fair comparison. If ChessBase is Photoshop, ChessRoots as it is now is just a simple painting tool. This isn't to say that ChessRoots can't be something worth the price down the road, but for now this is not a great comparison.

Chess.com is also something that I've happily paid for for many years. For $99 a year, you get unlimited tactics training, engine analysis (with Stockfish), and a full license to what used to be called Chess Mentor, in addition to opening specific training.

[charmides]

That is not a favourable comparison for this website.

For those who are looking for chess opening preparation software for free, I recommend just using lichess.org. Considering that lichess is ad-free and run by volunteers only, it is amazing how much it offers (although it's not enough for chess professionals).

[ganeshkrishnan]

Lichess is for professionals. Plenty of GMs ims and masters play on it. Even Magnus plays the tournaments. This is like saying Linux is not enough for computer professionals.

[Stratoscope]

For anyone else like me who knows a little about chess but was wondering what a "transposition" is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposition_(chess)

[sansnomme]

Oooh, this would be really useful for debugging minmax and other search algorithms if you can increase it to encompass the whole game. Congrats on shipping! What stack are you using?

[p5a0u9l]

cool tool. is the source code available?