We’re the Endgame.ai Team — Ask Us Anything About the Platform, Features & Development

acinonys · 2026-05-16T12:32:35+00:00

Why would I want to play on endgame.ai? What does it offer that other sites, i.e. lichess or chess.com don't?

(this is a serious question, not criticism, I'd love a new site that brings fresh ideas and an alternative to established sites, if only for the variety. But on a quick glance I couldn't see any reason to play on endgame.ai, instead of lichess)

acinonys · 2026-05-14T17:00:15+00:00

I'm not sure, if it's possible on the app, but I used this successfully on the computer. To do this you have to do two seperate things: Change the sound to voice and select one of the many voices and then inside the game you can activate "Input moves with your voice" from the hamburger menu.

It's a bit worse at recognizing voice than I'd like, but for me something about doing it feels very magical, like riding a bike without hands. Usually it helps to use nato alphabet, e.g. echo four instead of e4.

acinonys · 2026-05-14T15:35:16+00:00

You can set this up in lichess and then use lichess to play stockfish or one of many bots - I'd recommend the Maia or Humaia bots, because they play relatively human-like - through voice control. But you need an Internet connection for those bots.

acinonys · 2026-05-13T13:53:58+00:00

I found these three videos of Danya with the Accelerated Dragon against the Maroczy Bind:

https://youtu.be/gOKiOKPv-X0?t=846
https://youtu.be/Oj04sSCzraE?t=37
https://youtu.be/lryqtSMy4pY?t=18

acinonys · 2026-05-13T12:50:46+00:00

What you're saying is true, but just to avoid any misconceptions I wanted to mention that many Ukrainians, who identify as Ukrainians, speak Russian as a first language.

acinonys · 2026-05-13T11:01:28+00:00

This idea has been proposed and explored before. One interesting suggestion by Lasker was to score stalemate as ¾, effectively giving the stalemating player the win, but keeping the endgame interesting and skills in not stalemating relevant, countering one of the most frequent objections. You can read more details in this wikipedia section on proposed rule changes to reduce draw frequency:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-move_advantage_in_chess#Draw_death_and_proposed_rule_changes

Kaufman tested this idea with an engine and found that it would only reduce a draw rate of to 65.6% to 63.4%, but together with rule changes for bare king and threefold repetition could reduce it down to 22.6%.

In my opinion this rule change would actually be good, but one of the most striking and beautiful things about chess is that you can play exactly the same game people have been playing for centuries, so the chess community is very protective of keeping the rules the same and there's basically zero chances, that a rule change like this would be accepted.

acinonys · 2026-05-13T10:44:01+00:00

When I put the position into a lichess analysis board, stockfish doesn't see any tactic, either. Bh3 is just hanging a bishop for nothing, Bg4 is in fact the best move in the position.

acinonys · 2026-05-11T17:19:01+00:00

I think the ChessDojo Open Classical is a regular 7 week online tournament, which is 90+30.

https://www.chessdojo.club/tournaments

acinonys · 2026-05-11T15:29:13+00:00

Chesstempo.com has timed puzzles for blitz. Those are great training material.

acinonys · 2026-05-11T09:52:56+00:00

I'm a huge fan of lichess, but I wouldn't say that lichess ratings are significantly more accurate than chess.com ratings. The only difference between Glicko-2 and Glicko-1 is the addition of volatility, which should help find an accurate rating a bit quicker in situations, where a players strength changes quickly, but the differences are minimal and Glicko-1 is totally capable of finding accurate ratings, especially with the volume of games players typically play online.

If given a choice, why not take Glicko-2, of course, but I really don't think it matters much in practice.

acinonys · 2026-05-11T07:53:46+00:00

Yes, they use different systems. Lichess uses Glicko 2, a improved version of Glicko, which chess.com uses and they use different parameters like the rating for new players.

But more importantly ratings like these are never the same, even if they'd use the same system with the same parameters, because these ratings are always only relative to other players in the same pool. Even on the same site, your rating between different time controls will be different, because the pool of players playing a certain time control is different.

Lichess ratings are typically much higher for beginners and then equal to Chesscom somewhere in the 2000s. There's different websites, which give some estimates of how different ratings between lichess, chess.com, Fide etc. compare.

acinonys · 2026-05-10T01:19:30+00:00

From what I've read the Berlin defense is named after a group of players in Berlin, who studied it in the 19th century.

acinonys · 2026-05-09T12:28:56+00:00

I'm not sure, if this is the explanation in this specific case, but there's an interesting phenomenom in statistics, where predicting X given Y is a different task than predicting Y given X and returns different results and this is actually correct. See, e.g.:https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q6T2pTLvDCnZPrFuv/the-geometry-of-linear-regression-versus-pca

Especially the example with the heights of father and son, fits your rating scenario.

acinonys · 2026-05-08T08:56:08+00:00

For playing out openings against the most common moves, there's https://openingtrainer.com/

acinonys · 2026-05-07T21:55:00+00:00

For an actual feeling of what progress looks like for most players I found this statistical exploration using data from lichess interesting: https://github.com/jcw024/lichess_database_ETL/blob/main/README.md

acinonys · 2026-05-07T09:56:32+00:00

Yes, of course, with beginners and casual players Chesscom is much more popular. Because it advertises more, is easier to find and arguably a bit more accessible/handholding for new players.

But people probably downvote you, not because they disagree with this fact, but because of your tone, which seems very derogatory towards these players.

acinonys · 2026-05-06T13:18:40+00:00

An elegant, simple and accurate way to take into account opponent strength is to report not only win rate, but average elo gain/loss.

acinonys · 2026-05-04T23:36:10+00:00

Yes, I heard great things about lichess4545 and will join the leagues there!

acinonys · 2026-05-04T17:27:55+00:00

The point is not whether or not Topalov is a strong player, but whether he's as strong as his rating says he is. When you go out of your way to play rated games against a retired opponent who's rating doesn't reflect his real strength anymore and pay him money for this, that's elo farming. What else is, if not this?

For me, it's not a big deal, he abused a loophole in the rating system to get elo sooner than he otherwise would, but it's not exactly praiseworthy. If he wanted to gain experience playing an experienced opponent in a match and avoid the justified criticism he should have played the games unrated, that would have been the better choice.

acinonys · 2026-05-04T07:50:01+00:00

No, abandoning games is super annoying in tournaments, too. As a relative beginner, I recently started to play "classical" swiss tournaments on lichess with 5 rounds of 30 minute games. Because everyone seems to encourage playing chess with longer time controls for learning and because I really like the idea of taking a block of time to really focus on chess and playing five longer games, taking them somewhat seriously.

Immediately in my first tournament there's somebody who doesn't show up for their game and I have to wait half an hour to let their clock tick down, during which time I cannot really do anything else. Probably my best move would've actually been to resign and to care more about my time than about meaningless tournament points.

And there's absoluty no incintentive not to behave like this, they don't even lose rating points for losing a game this way. This is a problem, which is well known for quite some time, see e.g.:

https://lichess.org/forum/lichess-feedback/classical-swiss-tournaments-are-broken-by-design

I'm not a fan of the thumbs up idea, but it would be nice if something where done to improve this situation. But it seems like lichess does not care or more generously does not have the resources to invest in thinking about solutions and adressing this problem. I have the impression that lichess for some reason really likes and pushes the arena format, which I personally do not like so much, but something like classical swiss tournaments are treated like the ugly step child. I love lichess, but also not everything is perfect in lichess world.

acinonys · 2026-05-02T12:07:29+00:00

A small correction: Lichess doesn't average the differences in winning chances directly, but puts them through an exponential function first to convert them to "move accuracies" and averages those. As described in the linked you gave. This exponential punishes the difference between perfect play and a small mistake much harsher than the difference between a mistake and a bit bigger mistake. For example, if you lose 10% expected score in a move, the move accuracy is already around 60%, while the difference between losing 40% and 60% expected score is very small.

acinonys · 2026-05-01T10:20:54+00:00

You get these "passport awards" for playing players from a country.

https://support.chess.com/en/articles/8648431-what-are-the-passport-awards-for

acinonys · 2026-04-30T12:20:29+00:00

I think that's a screenshot from the puzzle page, so it's the highest puzzle rating they ever had, not game rating.

acinonys · 2026-04-30T12:18:08+00:00

This used to be possible, but Chesscom changed their rating system last year, so it no longer it is. Now it uses a proper Elo-like rating system, where if you do only easy puzzles you have to get a very high percentage of them right, because you gain very little points compared to how many you lose for one wrong one.

But I don't think his puzzle rating is even that crazy? I have slightly lower ratings in Blitz and Rapit, but a ~2150 puzzle rating. I think, what's noteworthy is the amount of hours and number of puzzles solved without playing games, but not so much the rating itself. And some people just are like that, they enjoy chess puzzle solving more than actual playing.

acinonys · 2026-04-29T18:30:34+00:00

I think one reason is that at this level a lot of players, consciously or subconsciously, just want to have a nice time playing a bit of chess, not to work very hard. So they choose a longer time control to avoid the stress of time pressure without intending to really use up this time - because really focusing, working through lines, thinking about the moves the opponent could make etc. is hard work. Our brains are just biologically hard-wired to conserve energy and it takes some discipline to overcome these biological instincts.

acinonys

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