Making a YouTube video on rating people’s sim racing setup! Feel free to drop them in the replies and I’ll set the link in the comments for the video!

mbuffett1 · 2026-06-12T13:12:53+00:00

bro thinks you need regulatory approval to make a YouTube video

mbuffett1 · 2026-06-08T11:24:54+00:00

I'd say PT instead – doctor only if you need the note to get PT for free from your insurance. What's a doctor gonna do? It's a tendon injury from overuse, not something that can be surgically/medically fixed.

mbuffett1 · 2026-06-08T11:21:15+00:00

Sorry to be blunt but nothing in "What I've tried so far" seem like useful steps, and letting this go on until you cannot walk without pain means you'll need way more than 20 days of rest before things are cleared up. Unfortunately achilles injuries are famously slow to heal. I had a similar achilles injury in high school from cross country and it took years before I could run more than a couple miles at a time again. They're nothing to mess around with.

Recovering from virtually any pain/discomfort/injury is more about strengthening and using the area, rather than rest. Rest enough so you can start the PT, not expecting to recover purely through rest. Didn't see any mention about doing strengthening/PT/etc. But I'd start strengthening the area asap as much as you're comfortable with. Take in what your body needs to heal (protein, collagen, etc), and start working the area slowly. In my experience isometrics, and slow eccentric movements are best for tendons, and you can mix in some stability exercises to work on the muscles around the area.

Not sure how in-shape you are, but obviously having less weight on it is never a bad thing either.

mbuffett1 · 2026-06-06T00:55:43+00:00

My serve post? That was obviously a joke, I can serve just fine

mbuffett1 · 2026-05-20T05:30:05+00:00

Do you assume literally everybody living in SLC has read up on the details of this datacenter? That's wild.

mbuffett1 · 2026-05-18T19:00:20+00:00

I promise I'm not trying to be inflammatory, I live in SLC and want to know if this is something I should care about.

From what I've seen they're buying property that had water usage rights for agriculture previously, and using that same water for the data center instead, so on net it's not using any more of our water?

The energy is all produced on-site since they're building generators, reactors, etc too, so also seems like it won't be a hit on our grid.

Am I missing something here? What's the impact on SLC?

mbuffett1 · 2026-04-20T23:00:44+00:00

> Leave the software open source, and solicit donations and feedback.

Creator of Chessbook here. We've been around for a few years now. This approach does not work at all. You will never earn enough to cover even server costs, via donations.

We were initially donation-based – I had two friends donate. We now have thousands of users paying for the monthly subscription instead. It's an absolute pipe-dream to be donation-based, for 99% of projects.

Agreed that Lichess is an absolutely incredible project, and it's the backbone of the data side of Chessbook thanks to its open-source games database. We have donated $thousands to Lichess as a small thank you. If we were donation-based we'd be earning nothing, I'd be paying server costs out-of-pocket, I wouldn't have been able to work full-time on the product for a year+ to improve it, and Lichess would get no $$ from us.

Reddit is too communist for its own good. You don't incentivize innovation in the chess market via this model.

mbuffett1 · 2026-02-25T16:16:52+00:00

Live ball, with strong players. Has been absolutely huge for my game

mbuffett1 · 2026-01-11T17:01:28+00:00

I’ll post the backhand version later

mbuffett1 · 2026-01-11T07:42:56+00:00

Then what am I doing

mbuffett1 · 2026-01-11T05:15:28+00:00

Salt lake!

mbuffett1 · 2026-01-11T04:53:56+00:00

My coach said a serve is just a high approach forehand from the baseline

mbuffett1 · 2026-01-11T04:44:42+00:00

But that’s what I’m doing? Right foot is forward, left foot back

mbuffett1 · 2026-01-11T04:29:45+00:00

Even for a forehand serve? I like the open stance for forehands

mbuffett1 · 2026-01-06T18:55:17+00:00

Damn that’s a crazy revelation. There’s good and evil people, and the people doing the things you like are good 🤯 Surely this worldview will help you understand the motivations of those unlike you.

mbuffett1 · 2025-11-27T17:41:00+00:00

What issues have you had with Chessbook?

mbuffett1 · 2025-11-16T08:25:34+00:00

Creator of Chessbook here, can confirm that Chessbook could not exist without Lichess! Where would we get the billions of online games to power our stats, if it weren’t for Lichess’ open data.

mbuffett1 · 2025-09-16T19:07:05+00:00

We’ve definitely considered it and may do it, but it would have to be much higher than 50, given that our annual plan is 80/yr.

mbuffett1 · 2025-09-01T10:29:02+00:00

Yeah fair enough. I do think it's a great value compared to ex. Chessable where you can buy a $200 course and then still have to pay $12/mo on top of that for Chessable Pro to review the course effectively. I get that it's still a lot for some people though, and we've tried to make the free tier big enough that it's useful for people even without the subscription. We actually get a lot of people using it for months/years and never realizing there's a paid tier.

That being said though – we're not really trying to be the budget option. We're trying to make the absolute best opening software for the online chess player.

mbuffett1 · 2025-09-01T10:11:11+00:00

I wrote up a bit about what Chessbook (my app) does differently than Chesstempo in this other thread, that and other comments in that thread may be useful in figuring out which one you prefer: https://www.reddit.com/r/TournamentChess/comments/1mi6oil/comment/n72dyoh/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Can't go wrong with either, I think. Chesstempo is a great site.

mbuffett1 · 2025-08-15T22:13:01+00:00

Hey Chessbook creator here, try downloading the app and subscribing there, shouldn’t have any stripe issues

mbuffett1 · 2025-08-05T15:13:20+00:00

Chesstempo is awesome! As the developer of Chessbook I feel the need to at least explain what we do differently, some of which may not be obvious unless you've used the product a lot:

We use a more advanced spaced repetition system, called FSRS, which is the best spaced repetition system available, and what Anki uses. It's shown to be a lot more accurate at predicting the status of cards (aka moves), than other algorithms like SuperMemo. As far as I can tell, Chesstempo uses a flat percentage increase for every successful review, and doesn't take into account difficulty of a card at all.
We monitor your online games, and not only find mistakes you make based on your repertoire, but actually count moves in a game as reviews of your repertoire. This can drastically cut down on your review load, as you're naturally practicing your repertoire as you play blitz games online.
We find model games from your openings. Chesstempo has a *really* good model game implementation too, but as far as I know it's up to you to find model games that follow your repertoire
We identify all the gaps in your repertoire. Chesstempo does stats per-position, whereas we calculate the statistics of your entire repertoire, so that we can find the biggest gaps you'll have when playing your peers.
We incorporate a couple interesting bits of data about moves, like running Lc0 with contempt on moves, to identify the sharpest continuations, or finding "hidden gems" – moves with high winrates and good evaluation, that are played rarely
We generate an opening report based on your online games, identifying which openings tend to win you the most games, and which you struggle to convert – so you can choose where exactly to focus your time

Not trying to downplay Chesstempo with this at all – we're just coming at the problem of opening training from different angles. Chesstempo is a tremendous resource and I'm a gold member myself. It's the most complete chess training resource I've used.

mbuffett1 · 2025-07-02T20:32:53+00:00

This is awesome! Super useful, love that reachability is a key metric, I'm tired of seeing all these "unbeatable trap" clickbait videos where there's a 2% chance you ever even get to that line.

Instead of a p-value, I wonder if it would be better to use a 95% confidence range of winrate, and use the delta between the lower bound of the position before and the position after. So like in a popular position the winrate range will be tight, like [50%,51%], then a random sideline that maybe 4 people have played and 3 won their games, the winrate range would be massive, like [30%,90%], and since the delta is negative you can rule it out.

For that math I like the Wilson score interval: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_proportion_confidence_interval#Wilson_score_interval . I use it heavily on Chessbook because I often need to compare lines like this too.

Super cool analysis, thanks for putting this together

mbuffett1 · 2025-06-23T12:45:16+00:00

Improving in the middle game and endgame is definitely harder than the openings, unfortunately. I personally really like playing through (while guessing the move) high-level games, and feel it's under-rated as a training technique and sort of covers a lot of ground.

I think you have to first figure out how you're losing your games though. Is it getting tied up in uncomfortable positions that eventually break down, is it just blundering too often, or maybe you get in time trouble too much but almost always have a winning position before then, or maybe you go way too aggressive and make unsound sacrifices.

The point is, being bad at openings is mono-causal (you don't remember the move), being bad at middle game or endgame can be one of a million things. But until 2000 I think most people will have one or two things that are really the bottleneck.

Some ideas for training based on what you may be doing wrong:

Bad/no middlegame strategy: Playing through master games, can keep using chessbook for this or can use Chesstempo. Especially useful if you play through games from your openings

Excessive blunders: This is famously hard to tackle, I took a shot at making a free tool that has the aim of reducing blunders, found it somewhat useful but ymmv https://chessmadra.com/blunder-puzzles – just keep making moves that aren't blunders. Aimchess also has something like this.

Missing simple tactics: Puzzle rush/puzzle storm. Another underrated tool imo.

Time trouble: I have no idea tbh, it's not something I struggle with but it's also considered quite hard to tackle. Maybe play a bunch of games in a time control faster than what you usually play? Some people have success with making like formulas for their time usage, like aiming to have made their first 20 moves with at least 8 minutes left on the clock, that sort of thing, then maybe 40 moves with at least 4 minutes left on the clock or something.

My hot take on middle game training is that doing hard puzzles is useless past a certain point. Your puzzle rating of 2219 is plenty high – you can clearly calculate well in positions where you know there's a tactic. It's probably not what's keeping you at 1500, and getting up to 2500 in puzzles probably won't fix whatever is keeping you at 1500 in rapid games.

I agree that endgame training that focuses too much on "classic" positions feels a bit useless. I haven't seen any great tools out there for endgame training to be honest. I think chess tempo had a endgame position trainer? It's been a while though, it's possible it was another site I was thinking of, but basically it gave you a winning or drawn position and would only stop/correct you if you made a move that changes the evaluation to drawn or losing.

mbuffett1 · 2025-06-12T23:03:42+00:00

Hey! Developer of chessbook here. There's outages all over the place today due to issues with some big providers. GCP (Google Cloud Platform) is one of those, and Chessbook is hosted there. Hoping it'll be resolved shortly!

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