Everyone who plays chess is to a greater or lesser extent a competitive person. You play chess because you like to create strategies and combinations better than those of your rivals, and prove to yourself that you are capable of it and end up winning the game. So in this article I will show you some of the best resources or tools that the internet offers so that you can improve your chess, win more games, and raise your rating.
The pages, applications or tools marked with the ★ symbol are my personal recommendation.
(IN) –> The tool is in English. / (IS) –> The tool is in Spanish.
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Tools to learn, improve and raise your rating in Chess
Websites to play
I have already said it many times in my articles on chess, but If you want to improve and raise your elo in chess, what you need in a 90% is PLAY GAMES. At least 2 or 3 games a day. There is nothing more important than that, so my first three tools for improvement are three very popular websites where you can play chess games.
★ Lichess (AGNES): The second most popular chess website in the world. It offers many more resources for free than its competition: it allows you to see a very good summary of your general performance as a player, create personalized studies and databases, analyze games with your own arrows and notes, and much more.
Chess.com (AGNES): The most popular chess site in the world. Also highly recommended and with many free and interesting resources.
Chess24 (AGNES): With a gigantic Spanish-speaking community and very popular among chess players from anywhere in the world. It is also the personal preference of world champion Magnus Carlsen.
Various pages to learn and raise elo
★ Aimchess (IN): Tool with a small free trial version. It is an artificial intelligence that analyzes both your Chess.com profile and your Lichess profile and shows you all kinds of statistics. From your performance in each phase of the game, to your specific performance with certain openings or time on the clock.
The application so far does not have much more use than knowing your playing style much better and practicing your most common mistakes a little, but this past April in 2021 they have signed a contract with Magnus Carlsen and his application team PlayMagnus, and it seems like they are preparing big things.
★ DecodeChess (IN): This application is another artificial intelligence. It has an incredibly innovative component, and it not only creates an analysis of the game you want to analyze, but its main purpose is to explain everything the computer thinks with human words, something that no one had done until now. With the free version you can analyze games superficially and then go much deeper in one or two plays per day.
Anish Giri himself thinks that it is a truly innovative tool and that it explains very well the moves and the thought process that a computer can follow. I have also used it especially to analyze very specific positions in my games in tournaments, and the truth is that it gives excellent results.
Hand and Brain Chess (IN): I haven't tried this application too much, because at the moment you can only play against the computer, but the idea is very interesting and is based on my favorite chess game mode: hand-brain chess, where four people play: two move, and two others say the type of piece that your partner has to move.
In this case you are the hand, and the computer is the brain. He will always tell you the type of piece with which you would make the best move in the position, and it is up to you to do what the computer was thinking or mess it up in a bad way :p. It certainly seems like an interesting project and it would be very fun to be able to play online and even be the one to choose the type of piece so that the computer and another person would have to make a move with that information.
Chessable (AGNES): One of the largest online websites to buy courses and books on chess. If you are interested in purchasing professional equipment, you may be interested in taking a look.
Listudy (AGNES): Interesting website where you can study thematic openings and endings by repeating each position as many times as you want. It also has a large repertoire of tactical puzzles, books, and more.
Chess Endgame Training (AGNES): This tool is similar to the previous one but focuses only on thematic endings. Ex: winning a king and queen ending against king and two knights.
Tactical Opportunity Chess (IN): You play games against the computer and it warns you every time it misses a tactical trick. It is a very original way of training tactics, because it also creates a context that you can follow, they are not loose puzzles.
Chess Channels on YouTube
- Gotham Chess (IN): It is currently the most active YouTube channel by far. Presented by Levy Rozman, an International Teacher from the United States who is highly involved with his YouTube channel and the entertainment and learning of all his followers.
- Eric Rosen (IN): My favorite chess channel on YouTube. Presented by an International Master who I like to call Eric "Loki" Rosen, because he is the master of traps and deception. His playing style is super creative, always trying to create chaotic and double-edged positions, with a large amount of tactics and traps. It is not as educational a channel as Gotham Chess, but it inspires me much more to play chess.
- ★ GM José Gascón del Nogal (IS): Without a doubt the chess channel that has helped me the most to improve my playing style has been José Gascón's. This Spanish/Venezuelan Grandmaster has a large number of videos in which he explains all his thought processes while playing games. He is not some chess super-genius, but he is someone who knows a lot, and also knows how to transmit his knowledge. 100% recommended although it is now somewhat more inactive.
- Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Atlanta (IN): Mostly presented by Grandmaster Ben Finegold. On this YouTube channel you will find some of the lessons that this teacher teaches in his chess club. It currently has 54 classes dedicated to people with less than 1400 elo points, and they have been immensely useful to me as I have to work as a chess teacher and be able to be slightly inspired by the advice it gives; He also explains the basic concepts in a very visual way, with great examples and a great sense of humor and sarcasm.
- GM Martinez-Alcantara (IS): The Peruvian Grandmaster Martínez Alcántara is the strongest player you will see in this list of recommendations, competing without problems against players of the stature of Naroditsky or Nakamura. On his YouTube channel he also tries to give a completely didactic approach to his games, however, he is able to think and calculate so absurdly fast that sometimes I am not able to follow him :p
- Manuel Morsa (IS): Manuel López aka "Morsa" is a Mexican Physicist with a master's degree in Artificial Intelligence and a doctorate in computer sciences. He is also a FIDE chess Master, and on his YouTube channel you will find educational and super entertaining videos. Yes, it is true that his content focuses on teaching chess, but the essence of his videos is to have a fun time with him and his cameraman, José Antonio Pontón.
Applications to Practice Tactics
Chesstempo (IN/ES): A gigantic database with online puzzles to practice tactics of any type and level.
Chesspuzzle.net (IN/ES): Another database to practice tactics online. In this case the puzzles are taken from tournament games, so each tactical exercise you are doing will be a move that some great player used in his game to gain an advantage, or that on the contrary he overlooked and lost the opportunity to press in that game.
Blitz Tactics (IN): Another tool to solve online tactics. This website is different from the others because you have 7 different ways to approach the tactics exercises. If you want you can take a look.
chesscup (IN): On this website you compete with other people to be the best at solving tactics exercises. It's another way to compete playing chess :p
Lichess Tactics Generator (IN): This tool is still in beta phase, but the idea is very original. It analyzes your Lichess account with all your games and generates some pgn files with tactical opportunities that you have missed in your own games.
★ Missed Lichess Tactics (https://tactics.bitcrafter.net/) (IN): This tool is very similar to the previous one, but somewhat more visual. You enter your Lichess username and the website is responsible for generating tactics exercises that you have overlooked in some of your online games.
Chess Blunders: A giant database to practice online. It has more than 6 million tournament games analyzed and a total of 1.7 million educational positions to practice extracted from all these games.
SOFTWARE
Luke Chess: All-in-one chess program.
ChessX: Chess database and PGN viewer.
ChessBase: Chess database. A must for serious learners.
Scid vs. PC: Create huge databases, run chess engines, and play casual games against the computer or online.
Chess Hero: The program picks random positions from the PGN files and challenges you to guess the best move computed by engine.
Apps to read positions and transfer them to your mobile
Chessvision.ai: Analyze chess positions from any website, image or video. Upload your chess books and study it.
Chessify: OCR, analysis and more.
Chessputzer
Books and PGNs (Format to save chess games)
Caissabase: Gigantic database of chess games. With almost 5 million famous games. Currently surpassing the famous Millionbase.
Project Gutenberg Chess Books
PGN Mentor
BeginChess
Statistics of Openings, Errors, etc…
★ OpeningTree: It allows you to see in a very graphic way and with percentages the popularity of each opening and play. You even have the option to filter by Lichess or Chess.com users to find out what openings he usually plays and what moves.
ChessTree: This other opening tree also shows you the popularity and percentage of each opening and move. It allows you to filter according to the elo of the players and even see the number of cheats in each variant you are investigating. For example: after playing 1. e4 more than half of novices will play ... e5, but only 20% of the masters will do the same.
Elometer: You have to solve 76 tactics problems and this website will indicate your level of play quite accurately. Or so they say. They are pretty tedious tactics problems so I wasn't motivated enough to finish them.
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