About Pupilmate
Finally, a place where you learn to see what a strong player sees.
For centuries, you learned chess from a book, or from someone sitting next to you at the board. On Pupilmate you play at your own strength, whenever you like, even at eleven at night. When a move matters, the trainer tells you why in plain words. After the game, what could have been better is waiting for you to practice.
What you do on Pupilmate
- PlayAgainst the computer, at the strength you choose. When a move matters, the trainer tells you why.
- PuzzlesA new puzzle every day, and puzzles by theme to practice.
- Pupil FrenzyFive minutes. As many puzzles as you can.
- OpeningsPractice an opening against the trainer, with White or with Black.
- Your gamesFetch your games from Lichess or Chess.com and see which mistakes keep coming back.
On the shoulders of giants
How the computer came to sit beside the board
6th century
Northern India
The oldest clear mentions of chaturanga, the ancestor of chess, come from northern India. The pieces form an army: infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariots.
1749
Philidor
François-André Danican Philidor writes Analyse du jeu des Échecs, for a long time the book chess players learned the game from. Of the pawns, he writes: "Ils sont l'âme des Échecs," they are the soul of chess. Philidor also composes more than twenty operas. At 67, in London, he wins two games at once without looking at the board.
1952
Alan Turing
With David Champernowne, he writes a chess program in 1948, but no computer exists yet that can run it. So Turing plays the computer himself. Against Alick Glennie, he works out every move with pen and paper, up to half an hour per move. The program loses in 29 moves.
1968
Stanley Kubrick
As a young man, Kubrick earns money playing chess, for a quarter a game in Washington Square Park in New York. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, an astronaut plays chess against his spaceship's computer. The moves come from a real game: Roesch versus Schlage, Hamburg 1910.
After 15…♕f3, White is mated in three, whatever he does. 1997
Deep Blue
In New York, world champion Garry Kasparov loses a match to Deep Blue, an IBM computer: 3½ to 2½. Never before had a reigning world champion lost a match to a computer under tournament conditions. In game 2, Kasparov resigns, and the next morning his friends show him he could have drawn by perpetual check.
Game 6, move 8: Deep Blue sacrifices a knight on e6. After 19 moves, Kasparov resigns. 2006
Colin M.L. Burnett
Burnett draws a set of chess pieces for Wikimedia Commons and releases them so anyone can use them. The pieces on the Pupilmate board are his, in the site's colors.
2008
Stockfish
Tord Romstad, Marco Costalba, and Joona Kiiski create Stockfish, a chess program anyone may use and improve. A change only goes in after tens of thousands of test games, played on volunteers' computers.
2010
Lichess
Thibault Duplessis starts Lichess: free chess, without ads. The puzzles you solve on Pupilmate come from hundreds of millions of games played on Lichess.
Now
Pupilmate
A chess program on a phone now beats any world champion. On Pupilmate, it sits beside your board, as your opponent and as your trainer.
Licenses
Stockfish is open source, under GPLv3. The puzzles from the Lichess puzzle database and the opening names from lichess-org/chess-openings are free to use (CC0). The pieces are based on those by Colin M.L. Burnett (GPLv2+).
Stockfish source codeWhat your browser keeps
You don't need an account. Solved puzzles, your practice positions, and your level are kept only by the browser you play in. You fetch your games directly from Lichess or Chess.com, and the computer analyzes them in your own browser.
Report a mistake or ask a question
A wrong move in a lesson, a puzzle that doesn't add up, something that breaks on your phone: write it down and it gets fixed.