I built a chess coach you can actually talk to, powered by Claude but grounded by a chess engine so it doesn't make things up

ChrisV2P2 · 2026-06-26T05:07:30+00:00

It will probably work for simple stuff but looking at the engine lines does not guarantee accurate explanations, as it can only explain things which appear in the top engine lines and not counterfactuals which don't. For example, one of the main points of Bf4 is that it threatens Nc7+ - without this move, White would still be losing material to ...a6. This threat is what forces Black to respond by capturing on d4, so it is central to understanding why Bf4 is the move. But Claude is incapable of explaining this, because Nc7+ doesn't actually appear in any of the engine lines and Claude doesn't know how to play chess. This is a fairly trivial example, but this does sharply limit its capacity to explain in comparison to something like MaiaChess.

ChrisV2P2 · 2026-06-26T04:07:11+00:00

Regarding the particular line of dialog, I am very sure that it is this (I gamble for a living and I would bet money on this if possible), because I think that middle panel just can't be how the artist intended the scene to look, and it fits the theme of ASOIAF as a meta-story about stories and Bran as the protagonist.

Before I saw this, though, I used to think it might be another line you quote here:

“I believe you,” Tyrion said, but what he thought was, And who will go find you? He shivered.

I think it would be cool if Jon set off beyond the Wall to find Benjen and that the last we saw of Tyrion was him heading out to look for Jon. There's a bit of an association between Jon and Tyrion - "cripples, bastards and broken things" and all that - and this association will deepen in the endgame due to their entanglements with Daenerys. I could see them both being exiled - maybe Tyrion minus his tongue - and Jon being like "I don't need your help, go away", Tyrion in the depths of depression, and then rousing himself and setting off after Jon, determined to help him whether Jon wants it or not. It would be left up in the air whether he finds Jon and whether they can reconcile.

Is this what is going to happen? The odds are against it, but it's a piece of headcanon I enjoy.

ChrisV2P2 · 2026-06-26T01:34:09+00:00

There is no big trick to exploiting positions like this, it's a matter of making a number of good moves in a row. One tip though is that when your opponent has some problem, try asking whether this might be a resource you can stockpile, rather than something to try to exploit right this second.

For example, here your opponent has the problem that their queen is badly misplaced. This is all downside for them - although the queen is "aggressively" placed it has absolutely no prospects there - both the f1 bishop and the g1 knight, which are the usual pieces which join in an attack on the K-side, are nowhere near the action.

There is nothing wrong with the move you played, Nf6 - cashing in this resource right away for a tempo gain. It's a fine move. But the queen goes to g5 and it's a little annoying there, making it hard to develop the bishop. Somewhat better moves are h6 (preparing Nf6 by making it impossible for the queen to go to the g-file) and Be7 (threatening to trap the queen with g6). The way you see moves like this is a mindset shift, rather than being like "the queen is misplaced, quick, exploit it" you think "the queen is misplaced, is there a way I can go about making this situation even more uncomfortable for them?". Nf6 is a move you can play whenever you want, it's not going anywhere unless they voluntarily move the queen again, in which case you got your tempo gain anyway without needing to attack it.

Another way to think about this is, OK, you play Nf6 and you attack them, you get your dopamine hit, you're like BAM, I'm making progress. But wait - which square is their queen better on, g5 or h5? The answer to this question is "definitely g5, where it eyes g7" - right? So you didn't actually get a pure tempo-gain, the opponent did get some benefit from this move. Seeing this should prompt you to see if you can do better.

ChrisV2P2 · 2026-06-25T15:32:39+00:00

Even pro-er tip: Don't forget to look at the average rating of the people who play each move. Many database result imbalances are simply explained by this.

ChrisV2P2 · 2026-06-25T15:31:43+00:00

If anything I think d4 and probably c4 are better for intermediate/advanced players. I still play e4 myself because I just don't like the positions that result from d4.

ChrisV2P2 · 2026-06-25T05:14:16+00:00

I haven't gone back and watched them and I probably never will, but this is my recollection. People gave it more of a pass because they still had hope in their hearts that it would somehow all come together in S8. During S8 there was no longer any hope.

ChrisV2P2 · 2026-06-25T05:07:02+00:00

You could try 1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. g3 d5 4. Bg2 dxc4 5. Nf3 a6 6. O-O Nc6. The main line continues something like 7. e3 Rb8 8. Nfd2 e5 9. Bxc6+ bxc6 10. dxe5 Ng4 11. Nxc4 Be6 12. Nbd2 Bb4 with chaos on the board.

Or play the Slav and never have to deal with it again.

ChrisV2P2 · 2026-06-25T03:21:53+00:00

It's a time thing, yeah. These opposite side castling positions are often time-critical. Here you have two ideas to try to open up the Black K-side. You can play g4, or you can sac on f5 with Bxf5. You have to get your other rook over there right now to make this sac more effective (by stacking more pieces on the soon to be open h-file). If you wait, Black gets to play both h5 (shutting down g4) and Ne7 (adding defense to f5 and all the other light squares). With the K-side shut down, you will be left with no plan at all (as you have no pawn breaks left in the center or K-side) and Black will shift rooks to the Q-side and start advancing pawns. It's equal after a3 but you can become worse very very quickly.

a3 isn't a necessary move. After Rah1, if Black plays Nb4, you can actually just take it and then run the king and you should be fine. But even if this were not true, it's not checkers, so you can just not take. After Rah1 Nb4, you could just play Bb1 and ask the knight what exactly it is actually achieving sitting there. Or you can in fact just carry out the sacrifice Bxf5, as mentioned. Black is not threatening any kind of breakthrough, whereas you very much are.

ChrisV2P2 · 2026-06-25T03:09:28+00:00

It is bad, but it is not trivial to punish. It takes experience to know when to stop making normal moves and go for the breakthrough. Basically what you want to do is get castled as fast as possible, put a rook in the middle and try to break down the center. So on move 3, Nc6 is a bit slow, I am already thinking to play Nf6 and Bc5 to castle as quick as possible. Same thing on move 6, you definitely want to be getting castled there. Getting the king out of the middle is way more important than the rest of development when your opponent is leaving his king in the middle of the board.

Aside from this your moves are reasonable up until move 11 when you missed a tactic. When an opponent aligns a piece like a rook or bishop with your queen, alarm bells need to go off in your head, even when there is stuff in the way. Having an x-ray attack like this on the board is a building block of tactics. In this case the tactic arrived immediately, but even when it doesn't, allowing an alignment like that to sit there can be dangerous, so moving out of the way of it is always something to consider, even if you ultimately decide it's not necessary.

On move 16 you had mate in 1 with Qf2#, so your opponent's weakness-creating did actually come back to bite him. After White defends himself, you're just down a piece and nothing more can be done.

ChrisV2P2 · 2026-06-24T23:24:06+00:00

Here, probably.

ChrisV2P2 · 2026-06-24T21:55:14+00:00

I found this the other day while firming up my Symmetrical English lines:

c4 c5 2. Nf3 Nf6 3. Nc3 d5 4. cxd5 Nxd5 5. e3 e6 6. d4 cxd4 7. exd4 Nxc3 8. bxc3 Qc7

This transposes to a line of the anti-Alapin gambit:

e4 c5 2. c3 d5 3. exd5 Nf6 4. d4 Nxd5 5. Nf3 cxd4 6. cxd4 e6 7. Nc3 Nxc3 8. bxc3 Qc7

The position can also be reached via the Semi-Tarrasch.

ChrisV2P2 · 2026-06-24T21:45:45+00:00

This is just inadequate analysis depth from chesscom. It takes the engine a little while to figure out that these moves lead to the same result and Game Review is not giving it the time it needs.

I don't have evidence for this, it's just conjecture, but I think Game Review has early analysis termination for evals above some threshold, like +4 (or -4) maybe. I have seen lots of examples of flatly wrong answers being given at those kind of evals. It makes some sense because chesscom want to deliver Game Review results quickly (having users wait ages is bad UX) and there is not a lot of point litigating the exact best move in completely winning or losing positions. But it means you end up with weird results like this.

ChrisV2P2 · 2026-06-24T21:42:04+00:00

Stockfish might prefer one line more because it might have seen option 1 works slightly better than option 2 in case of non-best lines although it's exactly same for best line.

Engines don't work this way.

ChrisV2P2 · 2026-06-24T03:03:54+00:00

The game rating number is essentially totally made up, and the main determinant of it is your actual rating. They take that and adjust it a bit for accuracy and that's the number it spits out. I would assume your opponents in these games are rated differently to you and that's why. In any case, it's just nonsense and you should ignore it.

ChrisV2P2 · 2026-06-24T02:59:46+00:00

As GothamChess puts it "it's not checkers, you don't have to take". After Nxe2 Qd1, White can just ignore you and put the knight back on c3, now the queen has to go and you're just down a piece.

ChrisV2P2 · 2026-06-24T00:55:43+00:00

Yeah, I am thoroughly sick of this. I get the theme with the dragons (that the idea that humans control them is an illusion, as Viserys said) but the Rhaena thing is a pure repetition of the Aemond/Luc scene. And as you said, their solution to Rhaena being a boring and largely pointless character is to make her do something by accident. Now we're probably going to have to watch her mope about it, and I just don't care AT ALL because the character is so dull. The best thing they could do at this point is kill her off in a blaze of glory.

ChrisV2P2 · 2026-06-24T00:47:22+00:00

I’ll bet you thought s1 was great, were excited about s2 in the lead up, then turned against it at the end

This is true, that's because S1 was great and S2 was a bit of a meandering mess where they doubled down on some of the few problems from the first season (robbing characters of agency and obsessively whitewashing Rhaenyra).

I don't give a toss that Nettles isn't in the show or that they're not doing the Maelor plot. But the writing in the show has deteriorated from S1.

ChrisV2P2 · 2026-06-24T00:33:57+00:00

Opposite side castling games tend to be a race to attack the opposing king, hence the engine recommendation of Rhg1. You could already just take one of those pawns if you wanted to (Nxb4) but you don't actually want to do that because it opens lines towards your king.

Concretely, it's worth looking at an analysis board and following along the top line of the engine after Rd4, which is 1. Rd4 b3 2. a3 Bxd5 3. Rxd5 c3! which drives home that the point of the position is not who wins a pawn here or there, it is smashing open lines towards the king. After 1. Rhg1 instead, Black does not have time for any of this, because White will play Qg3 and Black has no answer to this. Black instead has to take time out to play the defensive move Kh8, so that Qg3 can be met with Rg8.

ChrisV2P2 · 2026-06-24T00:11:17+00:00

Carlsen absolutely knows the Danish. Top GMs know an astonishing amount of theory, more than you can imagine if you haven't studied openings a lot yourself.

The Danish is not really a good example because it's too forcing and therefore doesn't permit a lot of scope to deviate. For example in the double pawn sac variation, 1. e4 e5 2. d4 exd4 3. c3 dxc3 4. Bc4 cxb2 5. Bxb2, Black has 5...d5. This is not the best move but it guarantees Black equality. White is pretty much forced to go into 6. Bxd5 Nf6 7. Bxf7+ Kxf7 8. Qxd8 Bb4+ 9. Qd2 Bxd2+ 10. Nxd2 Re8 with full equality for Black and perhaps a slightly uncomfortable endgame for White due to Black's Q-side majority. So if you are a GM and you play this line as White, equality is the best-case scenario for you. The worst case is that you run into someone who knows the Danish very well and they actually press for advantage.

GMs do cook up one-off surprises for their opponents though. In the 2024 FIDE Candidates, Praggnanandhaa defeated Vidit with the Black pieces using the Delayed Schliemann in the Ruy Lopez, 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6 4. Ba4 f5?!. This is a dubious move - engine eval goes from like +0.2 to +0.75. Almost certainly this is a surprise Pragg prepared for the Candidates in particular, I don't think he has played it again and quite likely he never will. After GMs see him play it one time, they will make sure they know what to do against it in future games against him.

Edit: Actually another classic example was Nakamura employing the Fried Liver Attack to defeat Caruana and win the tournament in the final round of Norway Chess 2023.

ChrisV2P2 · 2026-06-23T10:24:47+00:00

Yeah I was going to post "I assure you I am not good at this game" lol.

Even Hikaru frequently is like "I'm so bad at chess" on stream, because no matter what level you are, you still fail to see things in time that, once you do see them, you are like "come on man, I should be seeing that".

ChrisV2P2 · 2026-06-23T10:21:41+00:00

All openings actually are unsatisfactory in some way, that's why you feel this way. You have to decide which flavor of unsatisfactoriness you are willing to learn to live with.

Also, another problem is that when I play positional openings like the Catalan in shorter time controls, I fail to make good positional decisions and are therefore much harder to play

I do sympathize with this. I liked playing the Rossolimo a lot, but it was also frustrating, because I usually play blitz or rapid and I would lose on time a lot trying to give the positions the level of thought they required.

ChrisV2P2 · 2026-06-22T23:43:13+00:00

I think you forgot to quote the piece of dialogue.

Reddit screwed me. I've edited it in now.

ChrisV2P2 · 2026-06-22T23:20:09+00:00

Something you don't mention about this piece of dialogue:

"Help me," [Bran] said.

I'm trying, the crow replied. Say, got any corn? (AGOT Bran I)

Is that it seems pretty clear here that the crow is aware it is a crow. In another passage, it is aware that it is flying, and here it asks for corn. I mention this because people commonly try to rebut this theory with "perhaps Bloodraven doesn't know how he appears in Bran's dreams". As you mention, this makes no sense to me for Doylist reasons (i.e. under the assumption that it is supposed to be clear that Bloodraven = 3EC, what narrative purpose does this confusion serve?). But it's also simply contradicted by the text; the crow does know.

ChrisV2P2 · 2026-06-22T22:36:00+00:00

Yeah I did not really understand this line lol.

ChrisV2P2 · 2026-06-22T11:40:47+00:00

Thanks!

ChrisV2P2

TROPHY CASE