Alternatives
Products that do what Play against well-known chess players' openings does
Hi, this is my first HN submission so please forgive the rough edges. For this project gathered chess positions from some well-known chess players with a lot of games. (Usually ~25k games and 1M+ positions. The most for any player was GM Aman Hambleton with 1.8M positions indexed.) With each board position I create a probability distribution of moves the player has made from that position. Then, I simply draw from that distribution (with sampling temperature) to choose a move. As long as there's at least one game with a given position, you can keep playing. You'll see that it's pretty easy…
- 1CG
For no specific reason, I trained a neural network to generate random chess positions that look similar to positions from actual games (from lichess db). I also made it so you can condition it on some fixed pieces, and adjust the number of pieces. It turned out to be quite effective and I find it surprisingly fun and instructive to generate e.g. endgame positions with a certain pawn structure (set low temperature, place some pawns and position the kings, adjust number of pieces to get an endgame), and then figure out how to win vs. the computer in those positions. I hooked it up so that you…
2024 · chessdream.ai
- 2BN
blunderchess.net is an open source, peer-to-peer chess app where every five moves, players each get to make one blunder-move for their opponent
2025 · blunderchess.net
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- 4CTChess Twist▲29
I continue my experiment of transposing classic games onto an irregular grid. I've previously released variants of minesweeper and checkers. And now I'd like to share my variant of Chess. Chess can be a pretty punishing game, but I thought this was nevertheless a way to make it even more challenging by making it trickier to anticipate your opponent, even though both players still have the same information. From the playtests I've done, that challenge is pretty compelling. It also seems to be more fun at 2 people, where both players keep surprising one another.
2024 · polyreplay.com
- 5PC
2017 · ba.net
- 6CA
Two years ago I sat down to build a chess engine for my kids' Christmas present. Wanted it to play badly enough to be beatable but not randomly bad: different styles so they could choose what to face. While building those styles I noticed the choices started looking like actual historical players' tendencies. Went looking. Turns out: given enough games from one person, you can extract enough of their decision pattern to reproduce it. Two years later, 41 players, ~3,000 games each. Tal sacrifices unsoundly. Morphy attacks like it's 1850. Capablanca grinds endgames. Same engine underneath,…
Apr 2026 · playchessgate.com
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Practice chess openings until they stick
Jul 2026 · trychessmate.com
- 8OC
My personal project: https://github.com/leonidasdeim/chasse Goal was to build session based chessboard game without any rules - to play just like oldschool over the board. Just create new board and share link with a friend. I would appreciate any feedback and github star. Thanks!
2023 · chasse.fun
- 9IB
I built this because I got tired of Stockfish giving me evaluations (+0.5) without explaining the actual plan. Most opening explorers focus on statistics (Win/Loss/Draw). I wanted a tool that explains the strategic intent behind the moves (e.g., "White plays c4 to clamp down on d5" vs just "White plays c4"). The Project: Comprehensive Database: I’ve mapped and annotated over 3,500 named opening variations. It covers everything from main lines (Ruy Lopez, Sicilian) to deep sidelines. Strategic Visualization: The UI highlights key squares and draws arrows based on the textual…
Jan 2026 · atlaschess.me
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- 12IB
Hi HN, here is my humble weekend project. I couldn’t find any similar utilities online that would let me download all of my chess games, so I decided to make one. It’s definitely imperfect, so please let me know if you have any feedback!
2023 · chessgamedownloader.fly.dev
- 13CB
Chessmate is a transformer-based model that predicts your next chess move, tailored to players around 1500 ELO on lichess. Soon it will also offer personalized models and a broader range of ELO-based models. Hopefully this can offer a new and innovative way to learn chess and enjoy playing against a uniquely challenging bot!
2024 · chessmate.ai
- 14LB
I made this basic website for my daughter (6) to learn how to move chess pieces. I wanted a simple game which didn't have all the rules, just how to get from A to B with a piece. Admittedly, as soon as I made this a friend pointed out https://lichess.org/learn which is really nice! There are a bunch of settings you can tweak to set the difficulty etc. Anyway, maybe will be a fun (short) diversion.
Oct 2025 · minichessgames.com
- 15PE
Test your prompt engineering skills by writing prompts and battling them against each other! Your prompt template can access the board state, the move history, and a list of legal moves, and the game engine selects the first legal move in the string response from the LLM you query. My best prompt so far ignores the board state and the move history and just tries to play mates, make captures, and promote pawns. Can you do better?
2023 · github.com
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- 17AC
Hello, This is something I've wanted to build for awhile (first bought the domain in 2020 (then lost it for a year+)). It's a tactics solver on each new tab page. There are 5 modes of play: Easy (<1200 elo) Medium (1200-1800) Hard (1800-2400) Expert (2400+) Speedrun (solve as many puzzles as possible in 60 seconds). I'm having a ton of fun with it, and definitely noticing improvements with actual games (definitely solved the most puzzles in my life while developing this extension). If you check it out, please let me know what you think. Any feedback is good!
Apr 2026 · leetchess.com
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Identify patterns in your mistakes to get better at chess
Jul 2026 · e4coach.com
- 20CL
As I was playing with the Outlines library (https://outlines-dev.github.io/outlines/), I discussed with my friend Maxime how funny it would be if we set up a way to pair LLMs in chess matches till one wins. The first time I tried it, it required substantial prompt engineering to get some of those LLMs to propose valid moves. Large language models can mostly stay focused and even play rather well; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37616170 for example. However small language models aren't as easy to convince. Some of those LLMs have seen very little…
2024 · huggingface.co
- 21AC
Oct 2025 · dontblunder.com
- 22RP
Online chess players, even excellent ones, are too busy playing actual chess to properly consider the implications of their pre-moves. As a result, a large majority of professional bullet and blitz games contain pre-move-related vulnerabilities.
2023 · jwiltshiregordon.github.io
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Chess, chess openings, drill chess openings, solve puzzles
Mar 2026 · openingsdrill.com
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