The connected chess improvement workspace
Analyze your games. Practise tactics by pattern. Explore millions of master games. Build your own Studies. Turn discoveries into deeper chess understanding — all in one connected workspace.
Free to start: one free account opens the whole Studio.
You review a game in one place. Research its opening somewhere else. Save interesting positions in another tool. Eventually, the ideas you wanted to remember get scattered.
ChessCanvas brings analysis, master-game exploration and personal study into one connected environment, so you spend more time understanding chess and less time managing tools.
How ChessCanvas thinks about improvement
ChessCanvas gives the stages that happen at the board a home — and is honest about which ones are yours.
Discover why moves, positions and decisions work.
Engine evaluation, variations, Game Review and your own comments.
In the appInvestigate master games, positions, opening choices and alternatives.
The 15.2 million-game database and the Position Explorer.
In the appOrganize discoveries into Studies with chapters, variations and comments.
Studies, saved to your account.
In the appPractice positions, test ideas and build familiarity.
Tactics Lab puzzles by pattern, Retry the move you missed, Thinking Mode and Guess the Move.
In the appCarry what you learned into your games and tournaments.
This part happens over the board, wherever you play.
At your boardReview decisions, find critical moments and inaccuracies, investigate alternatives.
Import the game and review it with Stockfish 19.
In the appReturn to your discoveries and deepen them over time.
Reopen your Studies and Library whenever you choose.
When you chooseIn the appworks in ChessCanvas today At your boardwhat you do in your own games When you chooseno automatic reminders yet
Use cases
A better opening. A confusing loss. A brilliant master game. A position worth remembering. ChessCanvas gives your chess questions a place to grow.
After a game
Import a game from Chess.com, Lichess or a PGN, review every decision with Stockfish 19, find the moments that turned it and play out the moves you could have chosen instead.
Before a game
See which moves strong players chose from your position and how they scored, open the games behind them and keep the useful lines in a Study.
Your notes
Organize positions, variations, comments and illustrative games into Study chapters that grow with your understanding.
Learning from the best
Search 15.2 million games by player, follow a position into the master games that reached it and see the plans behind each choice.
Your mistakes
Game Review marks each move, shows the better line and lets you retry the moment yourself until the idea is yours.
Tactics
Practise 1,139 puzzles from the Lichess puzzle database by pattern and difficulty, with hints, an optional timer and a recap that replays the ones you missed.
Tournaments
Research the games and positions that matter for your next event, write your own notes beside them and return to the key variations before you play.
Coaches
Build annotated Studies around instructive games, typical mistakes and meaningful variations, and share them with a link.
The software
Stockfish 19 evaluates every position in your browser. Game Review classifies each move for both players, gives each side an accuracy score and shows the better line.
Historical and modern over-the-board master games, plus the Online Elite collection, kept as separate populations. Search by player and narrow by colour, result, year and rating.
The Position Explorer follows the board: what was played from here, how often, and how it scored — for the first 15 moves of every game. Pin one population and compare it with another.
Opening preparation
Chapters, variations and comments, saved to your account. Start a chapter from your analysis, a PGN, a FEN or a master game, and export it as PGN whenever you like.
Chess Studies
New · Tactics Lab
Tactical puzzle practice built around patterns. Train a ChessCanvas Mix or the patterns you choose, at the difficulty you choose, with hints, retries and an optional timer.
A Chess.com or Lichess game link, your latest games by username, or any PGN — pasted or dropped as a file. Positions come in as FEN.
Your games and positions are kept in your Library on your device. Sign in and your Studies, and your imported Chess.com and Lichess games, are saved with your account.
Analysis, Game Review and Studies have a phone layout with the board first and the review a tab away. Import a game on the way home from your tournament and review it there and then.
Who it’s for
Understand your mistakes, investigate your openings and keep your improvement work in one place.
Research positions, prepare variations and study the master games that reached them.
Build structured examples and annotated Studies for your lessons, and share them with a link.
Use the same research and study tools to support structured chess education.
What you can check for yourself
The open-source engine runs in your browser. Your games are not uploaded to be analyzed.
15.2 million searchable games, with every population kept separate and its source recorded.
Accuracy and move thresholds follow Lichess’s published method.
Sign-in and sign-up run on Amazon Cognito with e-mail verification.
Analysis, review, imports, the database, Tactics and Studies all come with a free ChessCanvas account.
Nothing between you and the board. Questions go to a real inbox: support@parallax-motion.com.
ChessCanvas is proud to include a selectively curated collection of historical master games sourced with permission from The Week in Chess (TWIC).
In the Pirc, the natural recapture 9…dxe5? runs into 10.Qd6!, and White scores heavily in master games. Here is a simple habit that spots this kind of trap before you fall into it.
The Berlin endgame is famous as a drawing line. Here is how White turned it into a win against the world champion, move by move, with Stockfish 19 checking every turning point.
Four different move orders reach the same Catalan position, and every one of them finds the same 45,726 master games. What a transposition is, and how to use it in your preparation.
Yes. Analysis, Game Review, imports, the 15.2 million-game database, the Position Explorer, your Library and the training modes are free to use. Studies are free with a free account. There is no paid plan today.
No. ChessCanvas is free: create a free account (an email address and a password) and everything in the Studio is open to you: analysis, game review, imports, the master database, Tactics and Studies. Your Studies and imported Chess.com and Lichess games are saved with your account.
Yes. Paste a Chess.com or Lichess game link, load your recent games by username (up to 50), or paste or drop a PGN file. You can also set up any position from a FEN.
Stockfish 19, running in your browser on your own device. Your games are not uploaded for analysis and there is no queue. Analysis speed depends on your device.
Each move is marked Theory, Best, As good as best, Sound, Inaccuracy, Mistake or Blunder, and exceptional moves can be recognized as Brilliant. Accuracy and the inaccuracy, mistake and blunder thresholds follow Lichess’s published method, so the numbers are comparable.
Yes. The Tactics Lab has 1,139 puzzles from the Lichess puzzle database (CC0) in 9 of the 17 tactical patterns ChessCanvas teaches. Every puzzle is replayed and checked automatically before it is offered; the pattern tags come from Lichess and are not individually reviewed by ChessCanvas. Training is free with a ChessCanvas account, which keeps your progress, goals and homework. Your results never change a rating: ChessCanvas has no player puzzle rating.
Yes. A Study holds chapters; each chapter has its own moves, variations and comments. Start a chapter from a blank board, a FEN, a PGN, your analysis or another chapter, and export any chapter as PGN. Studies can be private, unlisted or public.
15.2 million searchable games: over 3.8 million over-the-board and historical master games, and about 11.3 million games from the Online Elite collection, kept as separate populations. Search starts from a player name and can be narrowed by colour, result, year and rating; the Position Explorer covers the first 15 moves. Opening-code (ECO), event and time-control filters are not available yet.
Yes. Analysis, Game Review and Studies have a phone layout with the board first. The Databases workspace works on phones but is designed for larger screens.
It is designed around one connected workflow rather than separate tools: the game you review, the master games you look up and the notes you keep all work on the same board and the same position, so a discovery can go straight into a Study chapter.
ChessCanvas is an independent project. It is not affiliated with Chess.com, Lichess or the Stockfish project; it works with their public game formats. Write to support@parallax-motion.com with questions or ideas.
Free to start: one free account opens analysis, the master database, Tactics and Studies.
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