Partial position search on my chess database went through a stretch where every result came back from the 1890s. No date filter was set. It just did that.
Each position maps to a list of game ids, and I was slicing the first 4,000 off that list before ranking anything. Ids run roughly oldest to newest, so the pool being ranked was the oldest games in the corpus and nothing modern ever got considered.
It survived a while because it looked fine. Fast, and the games really did contain the position you asked for. You'd have to know there were 10.4 million games in there to notice yours only ever came from a few thousand.
Fixed now. Launching here on 1 September.
Hey PH, I'm Andrew. I built this on my own.
I bought ChessBase a few years back. It's what serious players use, and I found it genuinely hard to use for simple things. Dense menus, and it lived on the one Windows machine I'd installed it on. So I built the prep tool I actually wanted, in a browser.
It principally functions as a chess database and preparation tool for the competitive chess player. You can store databases, research opponents, check statistics and create and prepare your repertoire.
You also get free access to look up games from the 10.5 million game database by exact or partial position or game theme. That way you dont need to know the exact opening you can just search for a particular pawn structure that interests you and find the relevant games immediately.
It won't study the positions for you. But if you've ever spent an evening hunting for decent examples of one structure, you know that hunt is most of the work.
The other thing worth poking at is the AI assisted coach. Before it answers, every move it names gets checked as legal on a real board, and claims like "mate in two" get checked against the engine. So the usual chatbot failure, a confident illegal move, gets caught. Try to break it with something messy and tactical. Genuinely, that helps me.
The workbench itself is the other half, and it's where the name comes from. Board, engine, notation, explorer, coach: they're panels you drag and resize into whatever layout suits what you're doing, saved per tab, with a fullscreen mode when you want nothing but the position. That's the bit I most wanted and couldn't get anywhere else.
The rest is what you'd expect and most of it's free: engine analysis, opening explorer, eval graph, move classification, repertoire training, opponent scouting, and a report that goes through your games and tells you where you're actually losing eval. Sign in and your library follows you to whatever machine you open next.
Pro is $9/mo or $72/yr and raises the ceilings: 35 coach questions a week and a bigger library.
Couple of things I'd rather say up front than have you find. It's desktop-first, because prep is a desktop activity, so on a phone you get search, review and scouting rather than the whole workbench. And once you're signed in your library backs up automatically, with no opt-out. Everything exports to PGN whenever you want.
I'll be around in the comments all day.
https://flexichess.com/
https://discord.com/invite/HKYPGJwGtG