Analysing a game

Move through the game

← and → step a move, ↑ and ↓ jump to the previous and next flagged move, Home and End go to the ends, and Space plays the engine's best move onto the board — the live engine's while it is on, otherwise the analysis's. ↵ plays the game's next move; inside a line it leaves the line first, so Space, Space, ↵ reads the engine's idea and carries on with the game. F flips the board, [ and ] open the previous and next game in your list. The full list is under Settings.

The controls sit around the board rather than under it. The row with your opponent's name, above the board, carries the three things that change what the board shows — flip, hints and the keyboard for typing a move, each lit while it is on — and, last, after a thin rule, the board settings, whose ⌄ says it opens a panel. The row with your own name, below the board, carries where you are in the game and what the position is worth. The row under that is what you do to the game — Note, Practise… — and, hard right, two sets of joined buttons: ⏮ ◀ ▶ ⏭ step through the game, and ‹⚐ ⚐› jump to the previous and next flagged move. A button that has nowhere to go (⏮ at the start) loses its face and says why when you point at it. What this game rarely needs, such as the way back to the explorer, is behind the ⋯.

The line between the board and the column on its right can be dragged; its grip turns blue when you point at it. Reached with Tab, the arrow keys nudge it, and a double-click puts it back where it started. The width is remembered in this browser. The board and the move column each keep a minimum width, so neither can be squeezed out.

The title bar says where the game came from and whose it is: the list you opened it from — Games, a saved filter such as Games › Losses as black, or Collections › League 2026 — and then the players as the page's title. Click the list to go back to it, with its filters, sort and page as you left them. On a phone the bar shows ‹ Games (or ‹ Collections) instead.

The line under it describes the game: the opening, its ECO code, where it came from, its time control, the date it was played and how it ended. On a Lichess or Chess.com game the source is a link, marked ↗, that opens the game on that site in a new tab; on a phone the same link is the arrow beside the Copy PGN button. When you opened the game from a list, ‹ › at the start of the line open the previous and next game in it ([ and ]); on a wide window the list's name stands beside them. A game that is in a collection carries that collection's chip there too, and the chip opens the games list filtered to that collection. Like the line's other items, the chips give way when the window is too narrow for them.

A chess960 game, or one that was set up from a position, starts the board from that position, and its moves are numbered from it: a game that begins with Black to move on move 12 opens on 12…. Copy PGN writes the start position into the export (SetUp and FEN), so another program reads the game back the same way.

What the badges mean

Each row of the move column has its move number in a shaded margin, then White's and Black's move in a cell each. Where the game was played with a clock, the clock as it stood after the move sits at the right edge of that move's cell, in orange under 20 seconds. The move the board is on fills its cell in blue, and its row's number turns blue too.

The move column marks a move ??, ?, ?! or ! and tints the flagged moves. To get from one to the next, use ↑ and ↓ or the transport buttons under the board, or click a mark on the evaluation graph; on a phone the Eval tab also lists them, with their count on the tab. What earns each badge is in Analysis. The column's title strip, Moves, says how many plies the game has and, at its right end, carries Copy PGN (the copy icon, or C), which puts the whole game on the clipboard as PGN; the icon turns into a tick when it has.

Read the evaluation graph

The curve under the board is the evaluation move by move, on the pane's Evaluation tab; clicking it seeks. only mine, at the right of that pane's tabs, marks only your own flagged moves on the curve. Its shape and its marks are board settings. Drawn as bars, a column whose position is a forced mate carries a # at its tip, when the column is wide enough to hold one.

See how long each move took

Where the game was played with a clock, the graph pane has a second tab, Move time: one column per move, White's up and Black's down, as tall as the think that went into it, with the same blunder and mistake marks as the evaluation. The scale is compressed, so a short move and a long one differ in height while a single very long think does not flatten the rest; thinks over two minutes are drawn as two minutes. A faint line on each side marks the increment, so a column under it is a move that gained time. Beside the plot each player's average think, longest think and time left at the end take the place of the accuracy tallies — a player who lost on time is left with 0:00 — and pointing at a column reads the move number and the think; the move and its clock are in the move table beside it. The first move of each side is played before the clock starts and is not counted. Clicking seeks, as on the evaluation. T opens this tab and V goes back to Evaluation.

Engine lines and the preview

The lines under the board are what the stored pass found: as many as that pass kept, two by default for the pass every game gets on import, as many as you chose for one you asked for. Point at one and it is drawn on the board, in whatever form you chose: the picker with the eye in the pane's title (Arrows, Overlay, Playthrough, Peek or Off) sets that, and the rest of it is under Line preview in the board settings.

Ask for a deeper look

Analyse…, at the right end of the engine pane's title on the Run tab, or A, opens a dialog that queues a run of your own over this game. While the engine is hidden the pane is gone, and the button moves to the row under the board. The run goes ahead of every import pass still waiting, and the button spins until it is done; until then neither the button nor A opens the dialog again. The square beside it stops the run, whether it is still waiting or already searching, and keeps nothing of it — the game stays as it was before you asked. While the analysis queue is paused, a run that has not started reads Paused instead of spinning, and starts once the queue is resumed; a run already searching carries on.

Engine	Every engine that is switched on and speaks UCI, on this machine and on your runners. The one holding the Analysis role is picked when the dialog opens; one that cannot run — its program gone, Maia on another machine — is greyed, with the reason written under the engines
Lines	How many candidate lines to keep per move, 1 to 5. Blank takes the import pass's line count from Analysis
Stop each move at	A number of seconds, a depth or a number of nodes. It opens on depth 24; switching to seconds starts at 5, switching to nodes at the import pass's budget
Moves	This move — the move that led to the position on the board, the one whose badge you are looking at; From here on — that move to the end; Whole game, which is where it opens. The first two are greyed at the starting position

A whole-game run becomes what the game is read from, statistics included; a run over part of the game answers for those moves and leaves the rest as it was. The Run tab's title then says what ran, d24 and MPV 2 for the default. What the dialog cannot queue — the engine switched off, a runner gone away — is said inside it, and nothing is queued. With no engine at all, the dialog offers to set up Stockfish in this browser instead; see Engines.

Try a move of your own

Play a move on the board and you are in a variation; Esc returns to the game. Pin this line keeps one with the game, so it is there next time and in the PGN export.

You can type the moves instead. M, or the keyboard button beside Hints above the board, opens a small box in the row under it: type Nf3, exd5, O-O or e8=Q — or plain g1f3 — and the move is played the moment it can only mean one thing, so a whole line goes in as one run of moves. Captures, checks and = are optional, the piece letters of your language work (Sf3 in German), and a move two pieces could make (Nd2 with both knights able) is reported as ambiguous until you add the file. ↵ plays what is typed when the box is waiting for more, Esc closes it. While the box has the cursor, the arrow keys move the caret rather than the game.

Practise from a position

Practise…, in the row under the board, or P, plays the position on the board out against the computer. The dialog asks three things:

You play	White or Black. It opens on the side at the bottom of the board
Against	Maia, or any search engine that is switched on, on this server, on a runner or in this browser. It opens on Maia where Maia can answer. An engine that cannot answer right now is greyed out, and the reason is written under the list
Strength	For an engine that has a rating limit, a rating between the lowest and highest it accepts, or Full strength. It opens on your Maia target rating. Stockfish's limit is calibrated for about a second a move. An engine without one plays at full strength. For Maia this is the Maia level instead, from the levels set in Analysis
Think time	How long an engine searches for each move: half a second to five seconds

If the computer is to move, it moves first. Play your moves on the board or type them with M. The engine searches for the think time and plays the move its rating limit picks. Maia plays a move humans at its level play in the position, chosen by how often they play it, so it makes their mistakes too.

While you practise, the evaluation, the engine pane, Maia, the graph and the arrows are hidden. A strip in their place says whose move it is. Show the engine, or H, brings them back without ending the game and starts the live engine on the position, on the Live tab. Hiding them again stops it. Take back removes your last move and the reply to it. The game ends by itself on mate, stalemate, insufficient material, the fifty-move rule or a threefold repetition.

Stop, P or Esc ends practice. The moves stay on the board as a line, so you can switch on the live engine and see where it went wrong, or keep the line with Pin this line. Leaving the line or going back to the game also ends practice. Nothing is stored unless you pin it.

Run the live engine

The engine pane has two tabs, Run and Live: what the stored pass found, and what an engine finds now, which stores nothing. Clicking Live, or pressing E from anywhere on the screen, starts the live engine on the position in front of you and moves the pane to Live. While it runs, a square stands beside the tabs: click it, or press E again, to stop the search and go back to Run. You can also click Run to look at the stored lines while the engine keeps going — the green dot on the Live tab keeps pulsing until you stop it.

On the Live tab the engine's name and the line count in the title are pickers: click the name to choose which engine searches, the count to choose how many lines it shows. Space plays its move onto the board. Once you leave the game line the pane goes to Live by itself while a search is running, since the stored pass never looked at the position you are in.

What a human would play

The Maia panel gives five moves with the odds of each at the level you pick, not the best move. It shows no line; see Analysis. The level in the panel's title is a picker: choose another level, or All levels, side by side to set every level next to each other. L does the same, and pressed again goes back to the one you picked.

Read a game without the engine

⇧E, or the Hide engine switch in the title bar, takes every engine verdict off this screen: the evaluation bar and the score, the ?? badges and the tinted rows, the graph, the engine and Maia panels. The moves, the clocks and your notes stay, and so does Analyse… — write down what you think went wrong, then ask and see. The mode holds until you press it again; the whole of it is under Settings.

A game can also arrive quiet on its own: with speeds picked under Hide the engine on in Analysis, a newly imported game at one of them is analysed but shows nothing of it, and a Show the engine button sits in the row under the board. Read the game, then press it — that game speaks from then on, and the others are untouched.

Write a note

N writes a note about the position on the board; Enter saves it, Shift+Enter is a new line. Notes come back in every game that reaches that position — see Notes.

The note box sits at the foot of the move list, so Book and Notes beside it have their whole height. At rest it is one line — Add a note…, or the first line of the note already on this position. Click into it, or press N or the Note button, and it opens upward over the move list, with the tags and Save note under the text; nothing else on the screen moves. Click anywhere else, or press Escape, and what you wrote is saved and the box folds back to one line. A note it could not save — an earlier save still on its way, or one that failed — keeps the box open until it is saved or cleared; a failed save's message goes once you step to another move. On a game that is not in your library the box is a line saying so instead, and the Notes tab says why. On a phone the box is at the foot of the Notes tab.

Not every thought is about a square. "Played this on no sleep", "the plan was wrong from the opening" — that is about the game, and written on move one it would come back under every game that opened the same way. So the first row of the Notes tab is always this game's own: its note about the whole game, under the label game, or — while it has none — an empty row asking what the game was about. Click it (or press ⇧N) and the note box is about the game; it says about the game above the tags. A game note names no position, so it stays with this game. Whatever you had already typed moves with it rather than being lost. Stepping the board, clicking a move's note or pressing N points the box back at the position.

A note that came in from another game, because that game reached the same position, says so under its text: from that game (from the model game for one that isn't yours), and the move it was written on when that game got there by another move order. That line is a link: it opens the other game at that move. A note written on the position alone says where instead — from the explorer, from the live board or via MCP — and links to that position in the explorer.

Either way you can come straight back. The explorer offers ← Back to game; another game offers a button in the row under its board named after the game you left — ← phib — Hubert2001 — and both return to exactly the position you were on.

Each of the two tabs carries a number, so you can see what is behind the closed one: Notes counts the notes on this game, Book the moves the chosen book has from the position on the board — Book 0 means none of those games got here. On Masters and Lichess the number appears once the board has stopped on a position and the book has answered.

The Book tab beside Notes shows how games went on from the position on the board; B opens it. The picker in its title row chooses which games: My games (the default), Masters (over-the-board games between players rated 2200 and up) or Lichess (rated games played on Lichess). Your choice is remembered in this browser.

On My games the tab is headed with the name of the opening the game is in, and a move that enters a named opening shows that name in its Opening column. On Masters and Lichess each move shows how many games played it and how they ended for White and Black, and a few of those games are listed underneath; clicking one opens it in the viewer the explorer uses. With Lichess chosen, the sliders button beside the picker opens the filters: which speeds and which rating bands count. When the track is narrow, the Opening column and then Avg drop step aside.

Both outside databases only answer once Lichess is connected; until then the tab offers Connect Lichess instead.

Collections

Collections…, behind the ⋯ under the board, puts this game in a collection or takes it out. It is the same checklist as Add to… in the games list, for this one game: tick a collection to add the game, untick it to take the game out. + New collection… makes one that starts with this game. A game you take out by hand stays out, even if it was the collection's rule that put it in when it arrived.

The correspondence tree

A game you played by correspondence carries a Correspondence tree entry behind the ⋯ under the board. It opens the tree that was built while the game was running — the candidate moves, the comments and what the engines said about each position — to read, not to change: the tree froze when the game did. The entry is there only for those games, and only while correspondence mode is on; the mode is Correspondence.