Breakdowns, level guides and essays from the chess.rodeo editors.
Game analysis shows where you lost ground and what you should have played. Stockfish 18 goes through every position, compares the move played with its own best move, and…
A chess analyzer runs an engine over positions and tells you who stands better and which move is strongest. On chess.rodeo that engine is Stockfish 18. It runs on the…
The board at /position is both a position editor and an analysis board. Set up the pieces or paste a FEN, play moves for either side, and switch Stockfish on when the…
Paste your Lichess username or a PGN and Stockfish 18 analyzes your games: it marks blunders and missed tactics, shows the best move in every position and scores…
A game report puts the essentials of a game on one screen: accuracy for both sides, how many inaccuracies, mistakes and blunders there were, and the moves where the game…
The evaluation graph shows how the engine’s evaluation changed from the first move of a game to the last. It tells you who stood better and after which move the game was…
When a game is analyzed, the engine writes an evaluation next to the position: +1.5, −2.0 or M3. It says who is better and by how much. This article explains what those…
If you have not been playing long, almost every game you lose has a move that left a piece where it could be taken, and your opponent took it for free. That is a hung…
Amateur games are decided by a short tactical shot more often than by strategy: a piece is left undefended, two pieces end up on the same line, or a check opens a second…
The Sicilian Defense starts with 1.e4 c5. It is one of the most common replies to 1.e4. Instead of the symmetrical 1…e5, Black puts a pawn on c5, and the position is…
At 1300 rapid on Chess.com, games are decided by blunders, missed tactics and lost endgames. Opening theory rarely comes into it. If you spend hours on 15-move lines of…
The number of puzzles you have solved says little. You can reach a thousand on timed puzzles alone, five minutes a day, guessing moves and looking at the answer, and the…
In the opening and the middlegame you can get by on general principles. The endgame has positions where they do not help: you have to know the plan in advance, or a win…
Players rated 1300–1700 often think the opening is what holds them back and that they should learn their lines deeper. The lines they memorize are rarely of any use to…
The London System is the most practical White repertoire for the 1300–1700 range. It is one development scheme that works against almost any defense. What speaks for it:
The Carlsbad is one of the basic pawn structures. It arises in the Queen’s Gambit after the exchange cxd5 exd5: White: no c-pawn, pawns on d4 and e3.
For White at 1300–1700 the London System is a comfortable choice. For Black one setup is not enough: 1.e4 and 1.d4 lead to different structures, so you need two…
Players rated under 1700 look for rating points in openings and tactics. Meanwhile some points are lost for other reasons: Tilt after a loss: you sat down to win the…
The puzzles here come from the open Lichess puzzle database: about six million positions from real games, each with its own rating and themes. Pick a theme, such as Mate…
Make an MP4 from your game with animated moves, move labels and an evaluation bar. Import the game from Chess.com, Lichess or a PGN and export it for TikTok, Reels,…
Paste a Chess.com or Lichess username, a game link or a PGN. Stockfish 18 analyzes the game in your browser: accuracy for both sides, a label on every move and the best…
The best time to review a game is right after you play it, while you still remember what you were thinking. Import it from Chess.com, Lichess or a PGN, and Stockfish 18…
The PGN analyzer takes a game in PGN format and runs it through Stockfish 18: it evaluates every position, labels every move and scores accuracy for both sides. Paste…
A FEN describes a chess position in one line. Paste it into the field below and the position opens on the board in analysis mode: Stockfish 18 shows the evaluation, the…
Accuracy is a percentage that says how close your moves were to Stockfish’s. Paste a Chess.com or Lichess username, a game link or a PGN, open the game, and once it is…
The Fried Liver Attack in the Italian Game: when the knight sacrifice on f7 works, how Black avoids it with 5…Na5, traps and practice positions.
Stockfish searches the lines that follow each move, scores the positions at the end of them with a neural network (NNUE), and plays the move that leads to the best…
Everyone makes mistakes, from beginners to grandmasters, but each level has its own. Below are the typical mistakes by rating band and what to do about them. At this…
Chess accuracy is a number from 0 to 100%. The less your moves lose compared with the engine’s best moves, the higher it is. A game gets 100% when none of your moves…
Chess.com and Lichess both analyze games with an engine, but the analysis works differently on each. Three things set them apart: how many games you can analyze for…
An engine shows you the moves where the evaluation dropped and what you could have played instead. Here is an order for analyzing your chess games on chess.rodeo: import…
Each guide is written for one rating band.
