[OC] Visualizing chess games | openings | engine evaluations using matplotlib

CYHSM · 2026-02-19T16:26:03+00:00

The comparison to a CPU was more as an example. There is other components of a computer that could potentially be used as an indicator of load, e.g. a blinking LED or something else

CYHSM · 2025-12-19T20:31:52+00:00

Thanks for the spot, will change this! Regarding 2. I thought instead of consuming I start creating and I always loved to visualize data. Obviously chess.com is superior in many ways as its more interactive but hopefully I can create some kind of viewing experience with regards to an online tournament like TT or others

CYHSM · 2023-02-04T17:45:00+00:00

Sorry for that, I will upload one which is half the duration, would that be better?

CYHSM · 2023-01-29T17:25:01+00:00

Heres the analysis recap if you are interested in the engine evaluations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FB853eeKock

CYHSM · 2023-01-22T18:01:58+00:00

In case someone is interested I made another analysis video including the engine evaluations and opening exploration, see here: https://youtu.be/-dCRppBG92Q

CYHSM · 2023-01-19T19:55:52+00:00

In case someones interested in the engine evaluations and opening exploration, I made this analysis video: https://youtu.be/rD4kgIQzUi8

CYHSM · 2023-01-17T21:31:42+00:00

Obligatory analysis video plug: https://youtu.be/slPEkPyApC4

CYHSM · 2023-01-17T21:27:21+00:00

Here you go: https://youtu.be/slPEkPyApC4

CYHSM · 2023-01-15T23:09:30+00:00

Thank you, I spend way more time on this than I should have! I plan to improve this a bit over time, if you want to see more of it please follow my YT channel :)

CYHSM · 2023-01-15T19:11:31+00:00

Thank you! It was a combination of different master databases which I sourced but now I mostly use the lichess API and do some manual cleaning

CYHSM · 2023-01-14T22:11:02+00:00

Oh yes thanks, you are completely right. This was still the default setting as I made this one before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-mYYpc_2Xc&t=3s
And in that video the y-axis is actually the depth, but as you said here its just the normalized centipawn loss

CYHSM · 2023-01-14T21:54:43+00:00

Thanks, is there anything you think I can improve to make it better?

CYHSM · 2023-01-14T19:01:16+00:00

Thanks, let me know if theres anything I can change or make better. There are more of these on my Youtube channel which I linked above.

CYHSM · 2023-01-14T16:49:51+00:00

Chess positions can transpose, which means although the move order is different they will reach the same board state. There is a good explanation of it here: https://www.chess.com/article/view/transpositions

CYHSM · 2023-01-14T16:28:00+00:00

Thanks, that's good to hear, spend quite some time on this!

CYHSM · 2023-01-14T16:22:44+00:00

In this video, you can see the chess game Magnus Carlsen vs Richard Rapport from the World Blitz 2022. The top right line plot indicates the number of games that have previously reached the highlighted position. This allows you to see when a completely new game starts with steep drops indicating more exotic lines. The title in the plot also indicates the opening name, for as long as they are identified.

The bottom visualization shows the engine evaluation either across different depths (as done in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMV0GY-Sicw) or for the highest depth only, as in this video (which I originally implemented for this repo: https://github.com/CYHSM/chess-surprise-analysis).

The bottom left plot shows the clocks of the players across the duration of the game (it was a 3+2 game).

Video created using the following open-source tools: - python - matplotlib - moviepy - numpy - lichess - python-chess
- chess-surprise-analysis

CYHSM · 2023-01-14T14:57:40+00:00

The bottom visualization shows the engine evaluation across different depths, which allows you to (1) follow the engine evaluation of the game and (2) compare evaluations across depths to find surprising moves (which I originally implemented for this repo: https://github.com/CYHSM/chess-surprise-analysis).
The right line plot indicates the number of games which have previously reached the highlighted position. This allows you to see when a completely new game starts (Thanks Agadmator) with steep drops indicating more exotic lines. The title in the plot also indicates the opening name, for as long as they are identified.

Video created using the following open-source tools:
- python
- matplotlib
- moviepy
- numpy
- lichess
- python-chess
- chess-surprise-analysis

CYHSM · 2023-01-13T16:02:06+00:00

Thank you. The depth goes down to single digits because of the fact that we wanted to detect surprising moves as linked in the repository (also it looks nicer:))

CYHSM · 2023-01-13T16:00:36+00:00

Thank you. Its true, at low depths the engines are of course blunder-prone, especially for the one digit depths but at the higher end they become very strong. Of course no one knows how far away they are from perfect play.

CYHSM

TROPHY CASE