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How is this different than a standard opening database? Chessgames.com has had this for probably at least 10 years-- https://www.chessgames.com/perl/explorer as do a bunch of other sites and software packages.



It's a toy compared to serious chess database software.

It looks like it only goes about 6 moves deep and often only considers the most popular moves. For example, after 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 a6 6.Be3, reaching one of the most popular positions in all chess, it only continues with 6...e5. Chessbase mobile shows 42k games for 6...e5 and 25k for 6...e6, as well as 17 other options, at least 3 of which are theoretically important. It also shows their statistical score and some stats about the strength of the players who chose each move. A couple of taps away are the full games and a computer analysis on my phone: on the desktop app I'd also have crowdsourced evaluations with up to three different engines at depths my phone would take all day to reach.

I see the warning to try it on tablet or desktop for the best experience, and maybe I'm missing some features I need to see later. But for now I don't think this even offers a cool visualization. I'd be interested to see a competitor here, but the state of the art (lichess, Chessbase, chessgames, chess24, Scid) is around 10 years ahead of this.


I don’t think this is a toy and frankly, referring to the results of someone’s hard work as ‘a toy’ is extremely disrespectful. Be kind.


My heart tells me that the vast majority of serious chess players are kind and genuine people (eg Jerry from ChessNetwork), but the amount of rank snobbery i actually observe severely limits my interest in learning more about the game.


You have to subscribe to go deeper.


There are a few ways I find the graph representation of openings to be interesting:

You can naturally view transpositions in a way that can be tricky with other opening explorers. I find coloring moves by player rating to be very helpful for spotting obscure moves better players make (Black-White win rate can be less helpful as good players play each other so win rates don't change much). I also just find it more fun to look at a graph than a standard opening explorer, so find myself exploring openings I otherwise would not have looked at.




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