Introducing ChessMonitor

25 Apr 20253,142 viewsEnglish (US)

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I've been working on ChessMonitor for more than four years and finally wanted to introduce it to Lichess users.

TL;DR: Check it out at ChessMonitor.com

I want to share a project I've been working on for the past few years that might be of interest to some of you: ChessMonitor
It's a web-based tool designed to help you analyze your chess games.

ChessMonitor focuses on finding patterns and statistical insights instead of move-by-move evaluations and supports linking multiple chess accounts (also from Chess.com), so that you have all your games in one place. Curious how effective your most played openings are against stronger players? Want to filter your games for a particular opening? Or just check out recent games of Magnus or Hikaru? That's exactly what ChessMonitor is built for.

What is ChessMonitor?

ChessMonitor puts an emphasis on flexible filtering, long-term trends, and personalized statistics.

A lot of the functionality is free, including:

Merging of Chess.com and Lichess games
Basic game analytics and trends
FIDE Elo Estimate
Filtering of games
Activity overview
World Map
List of famous and common Opponents
and more...

In addition, there is also functionality that is only available to subscribers, including:

Uploading and exploring your own PGN files (up to 10 games for free users)
Full access to the Masters Database that contains about 10 million games from over-the-board (OTB) games, tournaments and correspondence matches. (I might dive deeper into the Masters Database in a future post as it's a huge project in itself!)
Bookmarks
Private profiles
Advanced filters
Bulk export of games (as PGN)
and more...

Feel free to check out the full list of features. To give you a simple example, check out my openings insights here:

Worst Openings

I set the filter (on the right) to "Last 6 Months" and made it sort by "Worst" resulting in it showing my worst performances of the recent months. My conclusion: I should probably figure out a better answer d4, as my d5 is clearly not working (80% lose rate as visible on the first row on the right).

To test this yourself, check out the Openings page of Hikaru as an example.

A Little Backstory

The idea for ChessMonitor started in the chess community on reddit, a few years ago (check out the original post here). I shared a rough prototype, got nice feedback and just kept building from there. For multiple years, it was a side-project for me. Last year, I got the opportunity to be part of a startup funding program that allowed me to work full-time on the project for the past year. I've released many new features, from PGN upload to the Masters database and also made the switch to an actual product which users can pay for.

Why share with the Lichess Community?

I've got a few upcoming technical posts in the works that I think could be interesting for the users at Lichess. I noticed there is a big overlap between chess players and people interested in the technology behind it. This includes technical topics like API usage, how to storage chess games to build a database and more. The plan is to publish these posts both on the ChessMonitor blog and here on Lichess, so if you're into the more technical side of chess, stay tuned!

Why not Open Source?

I’ve worked on many open source projects in the past, and I love what Lichess has achieved. But projects like Lichess and Wikipedia are the exception, not the rule. Most open source tools struggle to receive any kind of donations. To make ChessMonitor sustainable (especially with its computing and storage demands), I chose a paid model while keeping most of the core freely available. That said, I’m planning to open source some parts of ChessMonitor soon.