Chess for Newbies

Chess gaining popularity

The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on the popularity of chess worldwide. While chess has always been a popular game, especially among enthusiasts and competitive players, the pandemic brought a renewed interest in the game and saw a surge in its popularity.

The release of the Netflix miniseries "The Queen's Gambit" in late 2020 further fueled the chess boom. The show depicted the story of a young female chess prodigy and received critical acclaim, capturing the attention of a wider audience. Many people, inspired by the series, developed an interest in learning and playing chess.

The graph on the left shows the number of games played on lichess server over time. It is perhaps the most widely used open-source, free website where you can play chess online. It reported a surge in new users and a significant rise in the number of games being played.

The Problem

Existing Chess training is targeted at players who have decent knowledge of chess openings.
Moreover, the games can be quite long (30 or more moves per player) and younger players often fail to reason out the moves.
In fact, in the elite games the moves are quite unintuitive to even advanced players.

Our Goal

We want to target extreme beginners (those who only know the moves), and show them common tricks to trap a fellow beginner player.
We focused on miniature games (less than 15 moves per player), to remove the reliance on deep chess theory.
We looked at 5 million unique games from the lichess database , to understand how common minature games go about.
We generate a sunburst map showing the most common games. The larger the region on the annulus, the more common the move is.
Click on "New Game" to play chess and compare your moves to the common ones!

Interaction Tips

Play a few games with your friends using our interactive chart to familiarize with chess openings!
Explore possible moves by hovering over the sunburst chart while playing. The moves will be visually represented on the left-hand chessboard.
"Lock" your desired moves by clicking on the sunburst. Click "Reset Sunburst" to unlock.
During a game, if you want to strategize for your next move, interact with the chessboard by moving the pieces. The corresponding moves will be highlighted on the sunburst chart for easy reference.
The default chart only shows the 500 most popular games, but one can use the "Number of Games" slider to see the more uncommon games to learn more about what makes these short games so interesting.
Use the "Player Ratings" slider to explore how players with different levels of proficiency approach the game. Alternatively, you can view the sunburst chart of elite professional players to appreciate their advanced strategies.

Moves of average players

We looked at over 5 million unique minature games on lichess between 2014-2016 played by players with various ELO ratings.

Some Findings

There are several common trappy lines we figured out. Here is an example:

1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 Nd4 4. Nxe5 Qg5! 5. Nxf7 Qxg2 6. Rf1 Qxe4# 7. Be2 Nf3#

This is known as Blackburne Shilling gambit.

Although these types of moves are typically not objectively the best, they are easy to understand in beginner's perspective yet have clear purpose. This may give advantage to one of the players and even quick wins sometimes.
The higher the ratings are, the more diverse openings we see. For instance, in the 1500-2000 level, 85.7% of the games start with 1. e4 e5 (that is, white's first move is pawn to e4 and black's response against it is pawn to e5). However, among 3500-4000 rated players, white's first moves are more uniformly distributed among e4, d4, Nf3 and so on.

Moves of elite players (ELO 2500+)

To compare we look at how the elite players (ELO 2500+) have played against each other in over 500 thousand games over the last three years (2020-2022).

Bishops

Target your opponent's weak f pawn! Pin your opponent's knight!

Note that f pawn is only protected by each king. In the opening stage, if you are a beginner, it's intuitive to develop your light square bishop (resp. dark square bishop in black's perspective) to the c4 square (resp. c5 square in black's perspective). If you're white, normally, your opponent's knight will be developed to c6 or f6 square. Hence its also good in many cases to develop your bishop with tempo to b5 or g5 square in order to restrict the mobility of the knight. This is called pin in chess.