Chess.com is pleased to announce the release of our latest feature for members: Insights. This new tool thoroughly analyzes your games and shows you where your best performance is and where you can improve. As the ancient Greek wisdom says, it is essential to know yourself to live a happy and fulfilling life. Now Insights can help you understand your chess game better than ever before!
Here are a few things you can do with the Insights feature:
Identify your strengths
Let’s face it, we all love to hear about how wonderful we are, especially if these flattery things are genuine. If you look at your Insights, you can find the moments and situations where you excel – and you are justifiably proud of that.
In addition to self-satisfaction, that data can also help you improve your results. Looking at your Insights can help you find out when you’re at your best. Once you know when you are performing better, you can do everything you can to reproduce these situations.
Let’s take a look at some examples of the kind of guidance Insights can give you. We will look at various chess players and personalities as examples:
GM Hikaru Nakamura really is the bullet king
Looking at the insights of GM Hikaru Nakamura, we can see that he is truly a bullet legend. Nakamura wins a whopping 76.6% of his blitz games and loses only 13.5% of the games he plays in that time check. However, his quick fingers really shine through when we look at his bullet stats: 84.2% wins and just 11.2% losses. Can you imagine winning eight out of ten games you play? If you can’t, just watch his stream and you’ll know what it looks like!
As you can see, looking at your Insights can help you prioritize playing in time controls where you dominate!
GM Ian Nepomniachtchi loves to play wild chess
World Champion GM Ian Nepomniachtchi’s challenger is a chess beast who thrives on wild, tactical games. Nepo’s Insights shows that his fame as a fighting player is justified: his best performances come from wild games when he wins more than 60% of the time. He also rarely loses in sharp games, which is another hallmark of a great tactical player.
That kind of information can also help you improve your results. If you’re a player like Nepomniachtchi, you have to pick battle openings that will lead to more tactical games. You can also use this data to guide your movements, preferring lines that lead to complications, rather than a more defensive and solid approach.
Determine your weaknesses
We all have strengths and weaknesses. You already know how to leverage your best features with Insights, so it’s time to learn how to reduce your shortcomings.
If you find an area where you’re a little behind, you can dedicate your next training session to improving it. With this focused approach, you can achieve better results much faster. Insights help you spend less time training and more time winning!
Let’s take a look at some other questions you can answer on the Insights page. We go to Insights from IM Danny Rensch to give him some chess advice:
What tactics should Danny practice?
Between commenting on PogChamps and twerking on stream with Samay Raina, Danny apparently didn’t have time to practice fork puzzles as much as he should have. Although he is an excellent tactical player, working on this particular skill would help him overtake other players at his level. Players with a similar rating will find more pawn, bishop, queen and king forks than Danny.
By emphasizing forks during his next tactical training sessions, Danny should have a head start and help him get ahead!
What stage of the game should Danny work on?
Danny’s opening theory seems to hold up, but it looks like he can improve his midgame, where his accuracy drops from 93.3 to 78.6.
While that kind of dip is common in the midgame, Danny can help get some great results by working on this stage of the game!
Discover erratic statistics
Are you a morning person or a night owl? How many queens have you casually left hanging? The answers are all on your Insights page, at least when it comes to chess.
Let’s take a look at some other of our favorite players and streamers’ insights to learn more about them:
How many queens perished under the supervision of WFM Alexandra Botez?
Few things are as humorous and exciting as watching the beloved Botez sisters accidentally give up their queen without compensation. But just how many times have we had the chance to appreciate the beauty of a perfectly executed Botez Gambit? Let’s take a look at WFM Alexandra Botez’s Insights to find out:
Of the 2,073 pieces she hung, 146 (7%) were queens. The records indicate that Alexandra hangs her queen almost as much as her knights (172) and bishops (176). While that’s not the best news for poor Alex, her infamous queen blunders grace us with hilarious clips. Thank you, Alexandra, for your noble sacrifice!
LEAK: The secret behind GM Daniel Naroditsky’s success
Have you noticed how GM Daniel Naroditsky consistently starts streaming late at night? Some may think it’s just a coincidence, or that he understands his fans’ Twitch viewing habits better than anyone else.
However, it seems that the truth goes further than that. Naroditsky’s Insights shows that he outperforms late at night and gains a whopping 4.1% more than in the morning.
Did Danya have access to privileged information all along? It’s hard to say. What we do know is that we hope he continues to do what he does because we all love watching his streams.
Where should GM Robert Hess go on vacation next?
You can also view your results against people of different nationalities.
The data from GM Robert Hess suggests that seven out of ten Chileans should be afraid of him – he wins most of his matches against players from the country, beating them 78.4% of the time. He also wins the most games against Canadian (64.8%) and Spanish (63.7%) players. However, it seems that Hess is not ready to take on the Norwegians (47.7%) and the Peruvians (30%).
Armed with this information, Hess can confidently plan his next vacation. Whether he opts for a glass of wine in Santiago or visiting his neighbors to the north, Hess can relax in the knowledge that he is unlikely to lose any points.
Have you checked out your Insights page yet? What is the most surprising thing you learned about yourself? Let us know in the comment section below!