Chessbook blog
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Improving in chess is hard. I built the world's most human-like chess AI to help me.
Getting better at chess is _really hard_. My theory is that it's at least partially because of the feedback lag. Imagine learning to play the violin, but you
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An honest review of my last year building Chessbook
Last year, I quit my job to work full-time on a chess app I created. It’s my first time working full-time on a project of my own, and it’s been both terrifyin
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Processing 6 Billion Chess Games in Less Than 2 Hours
I run a chess site, https://chessbook.com. We ingest a _ton_ of games, nearly 6 billion, to power our various statistics. Our current database has about 900 m
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Compressing Chess Moves Even Further, To 3.7 Bits Per Move
I wrote [a post](/posts/compressing-chess-moves) yesterday about how to compress chess moves. I was pretty happy with my hand-rolled compression scheme, which
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Compressing Chess Moves for Fun and Profit
UPDATE: I've written a [new post](/posts/compressing-chess-moves-even-further) with a new technique which is about 2.5x more efficient than this approach
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Which openings lead to the shortest games? What about the longest games?
Average game length by opening, from 100 million Lichess games between 1200 and 1800: the first moves that don't matter, the gambits that end in miniatures, and the closed openings that drag on.
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How some common material imbalances affect your win-rate
How much more likely are you to win after winning the exchange? What about two minors for a rook? What about two rooks for a queen? Data from 100 million Lichess games, by rating.
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How useless is memorizing openings, as an amateur Lichess player?
I recently downloaded Lichess' database of all December '21 games. After using it to generate puzzles for my chess training site, I realized I could also use
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Generating Chess Puzzles Fast with Rust and Stockfish
Generally, chess puzzles will present you with a position and ask you to find the best move. There's only one, and all other moves are losing. These are great
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Thoughts on chess improvement, after gaining 600 points in 6 months
I played chess briefly with my friends in high school, where I had a rating of around 1100 online. I gave up the game for about 10 years, then picked it back
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Creating a basic chess AI with Python
Recently, I made a chess program in Python and published the source on github [here](https://github.com/marcusbuffett/command-line-chess). The code is just un
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