chesslord

Any diagram becomes a board you can play.

Chesslord reads a chess position out of an image — a book scan, a PDF, a screenshot — and hands back a live board with the engine’s verdict on it. The engine runs on your own device, so the answer is immediate and the position never needs our servers to be awake.

Start freeOpen a position

One position free without an account.

From the page
Fig. — authored example, not a user upload
On your board
Rd8# · mate in 1
Decoded6k1/5ppp/8/8/8/8/6PP/3R2K1 w - - 0 1

Three stations, and the second one is the one you are doing by hand today.

  1. Image in

    Hand it the artifact you actually have. A photographed book page, a PDF export, a screenshot from a stream or a group chat. No board to set up, no squares to retype.

  2. Position out

    The image is read into FEN — the notation every chess program speaks. That string is the position, and it is the same string the engine, the board and your saved history all use.

  3. Board you can push

    The position lands on a live board, not in a screenshot of an answer. Take the engine’s move, or overrule it and play your own, and keep going until you understand why it wins.

What it reads, and what it refuses to guess at.

Reads
  • Diagrams printed in books and magazines
  • PDF and ebook exports
  • Screenshots from streams, apps and analysis boards
  • Position images pasted into chats and posts
Does not read
  • Photographs of physical boards, at any angle
  • Video, or a position that is still in motion
  • Handwritten scoresheets and move lists

A photographed board is a harder problem with a worse answer, so Chesslord does not pretend to solve it. Flat diagrams it can be held to.

The engine is yours, not ours.

Stockfish runs in your browser, on your machine. Nothing about the position you are studying is queued behind another user’s request, and nothing waits for a container to wake up. It also means the analysis stays where it started — with you.

When the read is wrong, you fix the square, not the upload.

Reading pieces off an image is never going to be perfect — a low-resolution scan, an unusual piece set, a watermark across the board. So correction is part of the flow rather than a dead end: the position arrives editable, you drop the right piece on the square that came back wrong, and the notation and the engine follow immediately.

Authored example
As read6k1/5ppp/8/8/8/8/6PP/3B2K1
After you correct d16k1/5ppp/8/8/8/8/6PP/3R2K1

One square changed; the position, the verdict and the saved copy all follow.

Start with the position you already have open.

One position free, no account. After that an account keeps your uploads, so a position you studied last week is still there when you want it again.

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