Frequently asked questions

Playing is free without limit. The free plan also includes the piece courses, the rules lessons, your first five openings, two campaign chapters, the daily puzzle, three engine analyses a week and five archive replays a day. A paid membership opens the remaining lessons and campaign chapters and raises the analysis, puzzle and replay limits.

No - you can play as a guest straight away, and the rankings, finished games, player profiles, the master game archive and the daily puzzle are open to everyone. An account keeps your rating, history and progress, which a guest session does not.

Guests play casual games only, can browse the rankings, finished games, player profiles and the master game archive, with five archive replays a day, and can solve the daily puzzle. Rated play, the learning drills, the other puzzles and analysis all need a free account.

English, Vietnamese, and Chinese in both simplified and traditional script. Master names and openings use the correct terms in each.

A rated game moves your Elo. Your rating sets your rank tier, from Silver up to Diamond, shown next to your name.

You choose the total time each player gets, an optional increment added after every move, and a cap on any single move.

Yes - ten strengths from Beginner to Grandmaster. Games against the engine are unrated.

In a game where both players agreed to them beforehand, a hint shows the engine's best move and a short verdict. Ratings are adjusted: whoever used a hint gains less and loses more than an opponent who did not.

Yes. Watch shows games in progress, and finished games can be replayed from a player's public profile, with or without an account.

Learn has 92 interactive lessons and drills: 5 first-steps lessons on the board, the pieces, their moves, check and notation, 55 drills on piece moves, tactics and opening lines, 20 opening systems, and 12 lessons on the classical checkmate patterns. In each one you play the moves on a board, and the site checks them.

Games and puzzles are rated separately. Your puzzle Elo reflects the positions you solve; your game Elo reflects your results against opponents.

A timed run: solve as many as you can before the clock ends. Your best score goes on the leaderboard.

After a game, analysis reports each side's accuracy, an evaluation graph, the best move at every turn, and a grade for each move played.

32,204 games: 12,003 dated games from Chinese national events (1990-2008) plus undated master and engine games, browsable by player, opening and year, and replayable move by move.

Yes, and they refill every day or every week. The free plan includes 3 engine analyses a week and 5 archive replays a day. Basic raises these limits to 10 analyses a week and 50 replays a day, and Standard and Premium raise them to 200 analyses a week and 500 replays a day.

It lifts limits: more engine analyses, more rated puzzles and Storm runs, more archive replays, in-game hints, and no ads. It does not change how rated games work.

From the membership page, at any time. You keep your benefits until the end of the period you have already paid for.

Nothing is deleted. Your rating, history and progress stay; only the raised limits go back to the free allowance.

The account details you give us and the games you play. We do not sell data. We use Google Analytics to count visits, and Google AdSense serves the ads that free accounts see, while members see none. We strip the query string from a page before reporting it, so nothing sensitive reaches either. The privacy policy has the detail.

Yes - write to us and we will remove it. Games you played remain in your opponents' histories, as they are part of their record too.

Use the forgot-password link on the sign-in page and we will email you a reset link.