Lichess Insights for You

 Today, I am going to share another cool feature of LiChess which you can use to systematically improve your game by focussing on key development areas.

The tool is "Chess Insights" and it is available from your profile link, just below the rating trendlines towards your right. Chess Insights utilizes your "analyzed games" and picks various data points from it and uses it to create insights into your game.  

There are many categories of facts, dimensions and metrics covering all aspects of the game. I will discuss the technical details in my next blog post. Today, lets take a quick bite of what is on offer and get hooked to it.

There are a number of pre-set insights that Lichess offers and these may be useful as a great starting point since you can get these at just 1-click without needing to get into too much detail.

• Do I gain more rating points against stronger or weaker opposition ?

This tells you how well you play against players stronger than, equal to or weaker than yourself. If you gain a lot of rating points against stronger opposition across many games (say 20 or more), then you are on the growth path and can improve rapidly. If on the other hand, most of your rating gain comes from players weaker than you, then you have likely hit a plateau and need to make a clear plan for improvement.

For my data, I see that I am gaining rating points against equal or stronger opposition but I have only 1 game against really strong opposition analyzed. So, may be a good sign but need to play more.

• How quickly do I move each piece in bullet or Blitz game?

This insight shows if you have any trouble evaluating moves by some specific pieces vs the others. If so, it will prompt for you to make a much more study of that piece movements, typical moves, maze paths etc to strengthen it.

 In my case, I see that I take relatively longer to move the Queen or the Bishop. This shows that possibly, I have a weakness in quickly evaluating Bishop or Queen moves and the impact. Let me note it down and see if any other insight  re-affirms it.

• What is the win-rate of my favorite openings as White?

This insight tells how you perform in your favorite openings from the white side in general. If in some favorite opening (as in what you most frequently play), if the win-rate is less than 60%, it would point out that you need to learn more about this opening or switch to some other opening. 

My data shows mostly good (>80 win rate) but in Scandinavian opening, I score just about 60% from white side. A point to ponder upon!

• What is the win-rate of my favorite openings as Black?

This is the same insight but from the black side - what is your win rate in your favorite opening as Black.

If you score less than 50% in any frequent opening, that is a call for action to study it in better detail and look at the various plans and defenses in depth.

In my case, I see mostly everything to be ok except a possible weakness as Black while playing the Scotch Game.

• How often do I take advantage of blunders by my opponent in each phase of the game?

This shows how good you are at spotting blunders from your opponents and taking advantage of the opportunities in all 3 phases of the game. Ideal score is 90-95% and acceptable is above 80%.

My score is around 85% or more in Openings, Middle-game as well as endgames. So it is good, but can be bettered.

• When I exchange Queens, how do the games end?

This would show whether you trade Queens too early shying away from a struggle or exchange only when you are expecting a clear win. Any win rate of less than 55% would mean you are trading off without any advantage. 

I have a healthy score of 70-86% when trading Queens which means this is ok for me.

• How well do I move each piece in the opening?

This shows your average centi-pawn-loss in the opening when moving different pieces. Ideally, it should be almost same across all pieces and the value should be low - lower the better. Any value above 40 means you are not finding good moves for that piece.

 In my case, I see a very clear degradation when employing Bishop or Queen moves in the opening. I am distinctly worse off in choosing their moves. 

Combined with the earlier insight on time taken while moving a piece, this shows a re-affirmation that I have a problem with the diagonally moving pieces and I need to work on that visualization, mazes, typical maneuvers etc. Great insight for me to work upon.

That completes a quick round-up of the LiChess Preset insights. Hope you too can use it for your own game and get clues on where to focus next!