About

What Is Chess Motif Stats?

Chess Motif Stats combines tactical practice with tools for reviewing your own games. It schedules reviews by motif and lets you examine the positions where you missed a tactic or allowed one. Use the guides to understand a pattern, then practice it in different positions.

Why practice by motif?

Mixed puzzles ask you to identify the tactic without a label. Focused practice lets you study one motif, such as a pin, in different positions. This site offers both. Use focused practice to explore an unfamiliar pattern, then mixed practice to check whether you can recognize it without being told its name. Neither puzzle results nor a review schedule alone establishes improvement in real games.

How It Works: Concept-Level SM-2

General training picks concepts that are due for review first. When nothing is due, it looks at your levels, accuracy, and other signals to choose a new concept or extra practice. Puzzles you attempted recently are skipped at first, but they may come back if the pool is too small. The radar chart summarizes your practice on this site. It is not a game rating or proof of mastery.

Scanning the board before you choose

Knowing a tactical pattern and spotting that move as a candidate in a game are different skills. A puzzle tells you a tactic is there. A game doesn't. So alongside regular puzzles, there are two drills for scanning the board. In Checks and captures, you select every move that gives check, then every capture, and then play your best move. The answer list is computed in code from the legal moves in the position. When you're signed in, the number of moves you missed is saved. There's no step yet for spotting your opponent's threats. Loose pieces has no moves to play. You tap every piece (on both sides, or only your opponent's) that has no defender or whose capture cannot be answered by a legal recapture. It doesn't judge whether an exchange is good. Kings are left out because they are never captured, and pawns because almost every position has a loose one. When you're signed in, the squares you picked and your score are saved.

Checks and capturesLoose pieces

Where the 53 Motifs Came From

Our 53 tracked concepts are based on the public Lichess puzzle themes. We leave out metadata tags such as short, long, and crushing, but keep mate-in-N categories for practicing calculation. Discovered attack, discovered check, and double check have separate entries. The four curriculum stages provide a suggested learning order; they are not a measurement of what an individual player is ready to learn.

Tools for Your Own Games

Besides training, there are two tools. Game analysis goes through one game move by move on the board and marks the tactics you missed. The multi-game diagnosis pools your recent rated games in the time control you pick. One game shows how that game went; many games show what you keep repeating. Neither needs an account. Your browser fetches games straight from chess.com or Lichess and runs Stockfish as a Web Worker in the tab. Games you paste or fetch are not uploaded for analysis. The one exception is an analysis link that contains the game (?pgn=): opening it sends the game to the server and CDN as part of the URL. If you're signed out, reports stay only in your browser's storage. If you're signed in, the coaching progress you start from a diagnosis is also saved to your account, including up to two example positions per tactic.

Analyze a gameDiagnose my games

Why This Exists

I learned chess the way most adults do: lots of random puzzles and a slowly rising rating. What frustrated me was that I knew what a pin was and still kept missing pins in real games. My blind spot wasn't 'tactics in general'. It was a handful of specific motifs. I couldn't find an app that worked out which motifs I was weak on and drilled them on a proper schedule. Chess Motif Stats is the tool I wished existed.

Who Runs This

Chess Motif Stats is built and run by kimenugi, an independent individual in the Republic of Korea. It's a side project, not a venture-backed company. The scope is narrow on purpose: one subject, chess tactical motifs, with both training and game review built around it. It isn't trying to be a chess super-app.

Data Sources and Curation

Puzzle positions come from the Lichess puzzle database (CC0 license). We keep only puzzles with a popularity of 70 or more and a rating deviation of 80 or less, to favor well-received puzzles with more stable rating estimates. We also clean up theme tags. Lichess metadata tags such as 'short', 'long', and 'crushing' describe the puzzle, not a tactical idea, so we don't track them as motifs. We review the list of 53 motifs periodically as more data comes in.

How this content is made and checked

The operator maintains the articles and reviews reported errors. Automated checks validate supported board diagrams, move sequences, and explicit chess assertions. These checks do not establish that every explanation, historical claim, or cited source is correct. If you spot a mistake, email us with the page and passage so we can investigate.