
Show HN: We used 890M chess games to make an interactive opening graph - chessroots
https://www.chessroots.com/
======
chessroots
Using the Lichess Database containing every live Lichess game ever played, we
created a website to visualize chess openings. Each move on the graph is
colored by the average Lichess rating of a player who makes it, you can use
the graph to visualize several games at once and find transpositions between
games. Transpositions are particularly interesting on a graph as they can be
hard to spot otherwise.

You can see data from players similar to you by filtering the graph by Elo or
time control. If you are interested in really high rated games you can swap
the database and see tournament games with >2000 Elo from the Kingbase
dataset, or to go even higher you can view a dataset from chess engines
playing each other. It can be surprising how different the graph looks in
tournament games compared to even high rated Lichess games, to swap or filter
the dataset click the graph button at the top of the screen.

If you want to see the opening from a specific game on the graph you can use
the "Trace Game" feature, then you can paste a PGN in, or if you are a Lichess
player you can grab games from your Lichess account. To find a position you
are interested in you can click search and enter it into a chessboard.

~~~
charmides
When I first looked at the website, I thought that it looked like a nice
student assignment or a weekend project. But seeing that you are already
attempting to monetize this website and that you are treating this somewhat
seriously, I have to tell you that your software is lightyears behind the
chess opening modules of professional chess software such as ChessBase 15 or
Chess Assistant 12.

[https://en.chessbase.com/post/announcing-grand-
chessbase-15-...](https://en.chessbase.com/post/announcing-grand-
chessbase-15-release)

[https://chessok.com/?page_id=19894](https://chessok.com/?page_id=19894)

~~~
robbiemitchell
This costs £2 per month, while ChessBase 15 costs anywhere from €119.90 to
€469.90 and Chess Assistant costs €59.96.

~~~
cepth
I can't speak to Chess Assistant, but as a longtime Chessbase owner/user, it
lets you:

* Search any database (proprietary or freely downloaded) for games matching positions (partial position matches too)

* Quiz yourself on openings; e.g. the actual memorization of the move orders, which I don't believe ChessRoots is showing

* Generate endless tactics problems to drill on

* Generate annotations for games; e.g. branching moves, variations, text comments etc.

* Graphical markup of positions, to show tactics like pins, skewers, forks, etc.

* ChessBase gives you a perpetual license. You can upgrade if you think new versions are worth it (they usually aren't). I happily used ChessBase 9 for several years before upgrading to 14.

It's really not a fair comparison. If ChessBase is Photoshop, ChessRoots as it
is now is just a simple painting tool. This isn't to say that ChessRoots can't
be something worth the price down the road, but for now this is not a great
comparison.

Chess.com is also something that I've happily paid for for many years. For $99
a year, you get unlimited tactics training, engine analysis (with Stockfish),
and a full license to what used to be called Chess Mentor, in addition to
opening specific training.

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gus_massa
The UI is not very clear. It's not obvious that you _must_ doubleclick a node
to expand it. Also, the options in the first move is to wide and it doesn't
enter in the screen.

Feature request: Can I permalink a node?

~~~
thenewnewguy
This might have been added since your comment, but for me it had a popup that
told me to double click a node to expand it on first load.

~~~
DagAgren
If you need a popup to tell you how to use the most basic feature of your UI,
that is a sign you need to rethink your UI.

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perspective1
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](https://www.chessgames.com/perl/explorer)
as do a bunch of other sites and software packages.

~~~
dmurray
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.

~~~
hluska
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.

~~~
jcims
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.

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__s
Think this dataset is heavily favored towards fast time controls, which gives
the great lead on e4 over d4, as opposed to 365chess
[https://www.365chess.com/opening.php](https://www.365chess.com/opening.php)

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mellosouls
This looks very interesting on first try, I'll take more of a look when I'm on
a decent screen.

Can you at the moment, or would it be possible to show a position score
calculation at each point? Obviously that is going to be time intensive if the
scores are not already available in your source data, but it might be a useful
addition as an option at any point. Explanatory comments also - where
available - would be nice.

Excellent work, good luck.

~~~
chessroots
Thanks for the feedback. I like the idea of adding position evaluations.
Perhaps we could do this with a precomputed pass over the dataset, or possibly
do a shallow analysis in the browser using a js port of stockfish, though this
is probably not the best option.

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nzealand
It is not at all apparent that you have to purchase a subscription in order to
see additional branches or go deeper.

Instead of a "\+ 21 Supporter Links" button that can not be clicked, how about
a "Subscribe to see 21 other branches!" with a link to your Support Us page.

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pickdenis
If you follow the thickest lines, you get into the fried liver or 5... Na5
lines. Very suspicious.

This is DEFINITELY biased towards fast time controls and low ELO.

~~~
Bostonian
I am not suspicious :). I have taught my son to avoid the fried liver attack
as black, but he has often walked into it and lost.

~~~
pickdenis
The fried liver was the first opening I ever studied while learning chess as a
8 year old. I had so much fun with it until someone pulled out 5... Na5 on me.
Then I cried.

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ummonk
Awesome work! Is there a reason the isn't integrated into the Lichess opening
explorer?

~~~
ganeshkrishnan
Lichess already has it inbuilt and in realtime. Just head into the analytics
and then click on opening explorer.

~~~
ummonk
Oh, I had not thought to look in the settings for the opening explorer until
today. I knew it had the database of master's games, but didn't know you could
explore games played on lichess and filter by rating. Learn something new all
the time.

~~~
Scarblac
What's missing is restricting it to your own games only, like chess.com has
for members. I think it'll come one day.

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seanwilson
Cool interface! What did you use to build it?

Does anyone know of any JavaScript based tools that let you explore graphs in
a similar way?

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scoot
h3, e5, uh... ️

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deadgrandmajoke
What do I need to know in order to make something like this from scratch as a
novice programmer?

Is understanding the HTML source code enough?

~~~
dmurray
Far from it. You'll need to know, at a mininum, some Javascript and a database
technology such as SQL. But it's good to start with being able to make a web
page in HTML and figure out how to add new small features one at a time,
learning new technologies as they come up.

