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Siderite / lichessTools

Browser extension that turbocharges the lichess.org site with extra functionalities
MIT License
22 stars 4 forks source link

Investigate chess pro features #625

Open Siderite opened 4 months ago

Siderite commented 4 months ago

I can tell you what are the useful functions I use, as well as pretty much every chess pro out there

  1. Going through recent games from big events - chessbase has a reasonable but not perfectly up-to-date online database. Ideally this should be up to date, but it's usually about 2-3 weeks delayed.

Chessbase also offers a big DB that they update regularly called "Mega Database", with excellent annotations. However, this is quite expensive, so personally I just maintain my own big database and download new games myself from a site called The Week In Chess (new games every week).

Sometimes I also download from lichess broadcasts and I will just flick through games on chessbase and analyse either with or without the engine.

  1. Using my self-maintained database, I also search for players e.g Magnus Carlsen and flick through their games in the same way.

  2. Preparation for my own opponents: tournaments typically give pairings a few hours before the round, so strong players always check their opponent's repertoire. Again, using my self-maintained DB, I search for my opponent and then hit the "Prepare Against" button on Chessbase which opens up a tree for the given opponent.

  3. Creating my opening databases, and analysing with the engine or the Chessbase online games database.

Chess professionals are all about storing and organising their analysis, building upon the analysis regularly. Obviously this also includes being able to easily access their files and revise the lines regularly.

How do professionals analyse? These days, using cloud engines: chessbase allows you to borrow engines on their cloud engine platform. People loaning the engines have cores of up to 128. Includes Stockfish and Leela. I don't know how significant that is, but for sure it is way more powerful to use their engines than my average ThinkPad :)

I guess a lot of that shows the emphasis on databases and being able to store/organise effectively/stay up to date. Anyway that's a lot of the chess pro's diet!

Siderite commented 4 months ago

I am not ready to cater to a free online chess database, so 1. is pretty much out. 2 and 3 can be served by PGN Editor, only after pasting all games of a player and merging them you run into the move limitation on study chapters. 4 is pretty much doable already, although studies are notoriously hard to search (no API)

In theory, the cloud engines can be used as an external lichess engine, I think, but the way it's all designed makes it very user unfriendly and I am not sure it works like that anyway. Have to investigate.