Launching today
LearnChess
Stop playing chess. Start understanding it.
24 followers
Stop playing chess. Start understanding it.
24 followers
Interactive lessons, unlimited puzzles and a plain-English AI coach in one connected system — finally understand the why and break your rating plateau.
Hey chess friends (and those who want to become one 😎)
I've played online chess for several years but my rating has been stuck. In that time, I tried lots of apps to improve, but each one was lacking in some fundamental way (and most of them had a terrible UX).
LearnChess is the chess learning app I wish existed! I took all the things I liked from the apps I used and put them together in a single one.
There are three main pillars to LearnChess:
♛ Daily puzzle practice (with puzzles you can also upload yourself to challenge others)
♛ Interactive lessons for 100+ openings and the most common endgames to study theory
♛ An intuitive analysis board with integrated engine and AI coach
Oh, and one of my favorite features is the Chrome extension which allows you to detect the position from any chessboard online (Lichess, Reddit, YouTube, ...) and open it directly on the analysis board to discuss it with the AI coach (or create a puzzle from it for others to solve).
You can use it as a total newcomer to learn the rules, or as a seasoned player to deepen your understanding of theory and analyse your own games.
This is still the beginning of LearnChess. I'd love your feedback to see what can be improved.
PS. If you sign up, feel free to email me your username directly (nikolas.burk@gmail.com) and I'll give you a Queen subscription to explore the entire app for one month, free of charge!
How does the AI coach actually explain ideas in plain English, like does it walk through specific lines and concepts from your games or just give generic tips?
@nazfidanolq9kt Great question (because LLMs are notoriously bad at chess and creating a robust AI coach wasn't easy)!
The AI coach is actually based on a two-layer system:
Layer 1: A deterministic, geometrical analysis of the best possible engine lines where each move is annotated with information about that move (whether it was a capture, or whether there are any tactical motifs associated with that, like a discovered attack, skewer, fork, ...)
Layer 2: The result of tier 1 (i.e. best engine lines with annotations) are fed into the context of the LLM. The user can also ask additional questions if they want to understand specifics about the current position or some possible move (e.g. "why is X bad?", "what's payoff of Y?").
That way, the AI coach doesn't need to rely on its own chess knowledge/understanding, but it has reliable facts from layer 1 to base its explanation on.
I built this because I was tired of using Stockfish and tracing potential lines until I saw why they were considered best (e.g. because 5 moves later, there was an opportunity to win material with a tactic). With the plain-English explanations, the coach can just tell me what's going to happen without me needing to trace lines manually.
Does that help?
Finally someone explains why a move works instead of just telling me to play it, the coach feedback after puzzles actually clicked for me on a few tactics I always missed.
Finally cracked why my openings kept falling apart thanks to the coach explaining the ideas behind moves. Puzzles tying directly into lessons feels way more useful than doing them in isolation.
How does the AI coach actually explain concepts in plain English — is it drawing from a fixed lesson library or can it adapt to whatever position you're stuck on?