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· 6 min read
Pawel Kacprzak

The Chessvision.ai eBook Reader has just reached 10k users and that's a huge milestone.

It was the first product with premium features I launched and that really boosted my confidence that Chessvision.ai can be much more than just a simple scanning tool. I'm really happy that so many people find value in it and constantly talk to me about new features and improvements that we together can bring to life.

I thought that reaching this 10k milestone is a good time to reflect a bit and write down where and how it started, what features were added in the process, and what's the plan for the feature.

Here's the current number of 10,040 users along with some reviews:

Current users

· One min read
Pawel Kacprzak

In this post, I want to show you how I correct my opening mistakes.

After playing a game, whether on lichess or chess.com, I analyze the game with the engine available there to see what bad moves I made. You probably think that's what most of us do and you are right.

However, the important question is:

Why that particular move was a mistake

And one way to answer that is to find YouTube videos explaining the position!

Finding YouTube video for a position​

Wouldn't it be amazing if you can find YouTube videos exactly matching a position you want to explore? Of course, since we love technology, we want to do it automatically. That's exactly what you can do in Video Opening Explorer

Here's a short video I made where I show the whole process. Hope you enjoy it!


Try it yourself: Open the Video Opening Explorer

· 2 min read
Pawel Kacprzak

Often when watching chess video lectures, I hear the advice of not capturing the opponent's piece in favor of putting more pressure, for example, to get a more decisive attack. Also, often we hear the phrase:

When you see a good move, look for a better one

and sometimes this good move can be a capture, but the better move is not a capture. The simplest example is probably going for a checkmate attack and ignore the opponent's hanging Queen.

Having these ideas, I thought that we can try to form a hypothesis:

The better the player is the fewer captures per move on average they make

Let's see if we can prove it using real data.

· 4 min read
Pawel Kacprzak

A few weeks ago I was thinking about imbalances and asymmetries in chess, how they are created and how one can use them to their advantage. For example, trading a Bishop for a Knight, or the e-Pawn for the d-Pawn.

A natural study can arise from such thinking. Let define the Piece Lifetime first.

Piece Lifetime is the number of full-moves the piece was in the game. A piece is in the game until it gets captured or the game ends.

an immediate question is "What's the average Piece Lifetime for each of the 32 pieces?".

· 2 min read
Pawel Kacprzak

So far the bot has been predicting whose turn it is only from the post title. It was simply looking for phrases like "white to play", "for white", etc. Now it becomes much smarter.

u/chessvision-ai-bot is on a roll: now it can predict whose turn it is from the highlighted squares on the board. A very famous position, this title doesn't hint whose turn is it to play. More in comments from r/chess

· 2 min read
Pawel Kacprzak

The images the bot analyzes are sometimes from White player's point of view and sometimes from Black player's point of view, and the bot has to somehow guess that to correctly analyze the position.

Previously, it was using a very simple heuristic - it was looking at the placement of the kings deciding that White moves up the board when White King is on a lower rank than the Black King. This heuristic works well in the opening and middle game phases, but it very often gives wrong results in the endgames.

Many people was complaining when the bot was wrong about the board orientation, and for a good reason!

So finally, the bot recognizes board orientations as we humans do - by reading the board coordinates!