Mislisha

Analyse a position or a game

One position, looked at properly: the engine's opinion, what masters have played, and a tree of the variations you try. It is also where a line you like becomes part of a tutorial.

Open it

Analysis is the Analyse tab — the board is the tab itself. Its bar reads in the order the work goes: Board puts something on the board, Review works on it, Save as… keeps it and Tutorial makes teaching material of it. On a phone the first two are buttons and the other two are behind ⋮.

Get a position onto the board

Everything here is a row of Board.

The engine

Stockfish runs on your own machine, and the panel beside the board shows what it thinks and the lines it is considering. Which panels you see is your choice, under Panels in the Board view menu of the bar; the engine itself is configured in Settings, with Configure local engine for a Custom local engine (.exe) if you have one.

The engine's three longer jobs are under Review, each with a line saying what it covers. Review entire game walks a whole game instead of one position, and Blunder detection is what marks the moments worth talking about: a move that turns a win into a draw, or a draw into a loss, gets a question mark, one that turns a win into a loss two, and beside it a short line with the better move, checked move by move; the board before the move shows that better move as an arrow. A threat is said in words, with its arrow and a frame on each piece that supports it. Choose Mistakes for only those, or Mistakes and slips for the smaller slips and the only moves found as well; the game ends with a summary of both sides. It can be told Analyze only from the current position forward when the opening is not the point.

Study one position

Study this position is for the opposite question: one position, gone through the way a strong player would talk you through it. The engine works out the main line, the moves that are as good as the best, the moves the eye goes to and why they are not the move, and the traps on the way. A trap is a capture that wins material and loses the position; it is marked with a question mark and followed by what punishes it, so the answer to „why not just take it?" is on the board. Everything is added to the tree under the move you are standing on, and nothing you wrote there is replaced.

With Write comments with AI ticked, each of those is put into words on the move it is about, and what is threatened is drawn on the board. The engine decides what is said and the model only words it: every sentence is checked against the analysis before it is kept, and one the analysis does not bear out is left out rather than shown. With seven men or fewer on the board the endgame tablebase decides the result, not the engine's number.

Comments in chooses the language the comments are written in, and the choice is kept for the next study. They are still written in English first, because that is the language the check reads; only the sentences that pass it are translated, and the translation is checked as well — every move, square and move number must come back exactly as it was, and moves keep their English letters. A sentence whose translation does not pass is left out rather than shown in English, and the end of the study says how many were. The translation adds some seconds to the wait and uses no more of your monthly studies.

Open as a tutorial takes the finished study to the Tutorial Studio, one line to a part, with its comments and its arrows. A new tutorial is marked as written in the language of the comments, so its film is spoken in it; a tutorial you were already writing keeps its own language, and says so if the study's is a different one.

The opening database

For a position early in a game, the explorer says what has actually been played there and how it turned out, counted over master games in which both players were rated 2200 or more. The book covers the first 50 plies of those games; for a position deeper than that, it says so rather than showing an empty list. You need to be signed in to see it.

The tree of what you tried

Every move you play is kept as a branch rather than replacing what was there, so trying a second idea does not lose the first. Right-click a move in the tree (on a phone, press and hold it) for its menu: Promote to Main Line makes a variation the main line, Move variation earlier and Move variation later change the order of the variations after it — the order the PGN writes them in — and Delete this variation removes one. Delete this move (and branch after it) takes back a single move with everything under it.

Words go on a move with Add Comment — later Add / Edit Comment — and NAG Symbols (!, ?) add the usual annotation marks. Generate AI comment offers a sentence about the move you are on — how it stands against the engine's own move and what follows it — if you want a starting point. It is written in the language chosen under Comments in, and says so when that is not English. It opens in the comment editor, and is yours only once you save it.

Keep it, or teach from it

Save as… keeps what is on the board, in four ways: Position is the board in front of you and no line, Exercise… is that position with a task, Analysis is the whole tree — it asks for a name under Save analysis — and PGN is the text, to copy or save as a file. The first three need an account.

To turn what is on the board into teaching material, open Tutorial in the bar — on a phone, Use in a tutorial behind ⋮. It offers three ways to start a new tutorial:

A tutorial from a game is built on Review entire game. If the game on the board has not been reviewed yet, the review runs first, at the level that marks mistakes and slips and shows the better lines, at the depth Review entire game last ran at (20 until you choose one there — the engine panel's own depth under the board plays no part); Reviewing the game… says the depth and how far it has got, and Cancel stops it with no tutorial made. A game reviewed earlier in this sitting is not reviewed again. The reviewed tree is then cut into parts exactly as New tutorial from this line cuts one: the game up to each mark, the better line beside it, the game going on — only the defender's capture that the review nests inside a line is left out. The review's own phrases stay on the moves as the checkable truth: a better move, an only move, a threat, a stop, who is winning after a question mark, and how the game ended.

Then the AI writes a comment on each of those moments and nothing else — on the move itself, on the first and the last move of its better line, on the ending — and a title for the tutorial; Writing the comments… is shown while it does, counting the seconds (usually under a minute, at most four), and Open without comments — or Escape — opens the tutorial at once without them. This is the one step that is paid for, and a tutorial opened early still pays for the comments it asked for. Every sentence is checked against the engine's facts before it is kept: one that names a move the lines do not hold, or a pin, a fork or a mate the facts do not show, is dropped and the phrase stands alone. Between the marked moments the board plays in silence. If the comments cannot be written — no allowance left, or the model does not answer — the tutorial opens all the same, without them, and a message says why. A game with no mark is a tutorial of the whole game in silence but for the ending.

The tutorial opens in English. To have it in another language, use Translate… in the studio, which translates the whole tutorial and checks that its moves come back exactly as they were.

It also lets you add to an existing tutorial or open one to edit:

What arrives in the studio is a part you can write on; see writing a tutorial.

What can go wrong