chess-intelligence

The mission

We read every game.
So you don't go in blind.

chess-intelligence started as a simple frustration: why does preparing for a specific opponent still require hours of manual database work? We built a crawler so you don't have to do it yourself.

Every serious chess player knows the ritual: you get your round-one pairing, you open your database, you search for your opponent's name, and you sift through whatever games happen to be indexed there — if any. You piece together their repertoire from incomplete evidence. You guess the rest.

That information exists. Thousands of sites, club archives, tournament pages, and correspondence servers host PGN files. But no single tool pulls all of it together, sorted, searchable, and ready to read. Until now.

"The files are out there. We just go and get them."

At its core, chess-intelligence is an autonomous web crawler built for one specific target: PGN files. Every night it sweeps a curated list of chess databases, club sites, tournament archives, and open repositories. When it finds a PGN, it parses the player names, FIDE IDs (when present), ratings, and move sequences, and writes it into the index.

  1. 01
    Discover

    The crawler navigates to known PGN sources — 80+ and growing. It follows links, unzips archives, and parses both inline and downloadable PGN.

  2. 02
    Normalise

    Player names are de-duplicated and matched against FIDE records where possible. Games are deduplicated by move sequence so the same game from two sources counts once.

  3. 03
    Index

    Each game is stored with full metadata and made searchable by player name, FIDE ID, opening name, ECO code, date range, and board position via FEN prefix.

Privacy note: We only index games that appear in publicly accessible PGN files. We do not collect or process any personal information beyond what is included in those files.

The position search is the feature we're most proud of. Set up any position on the board — say, after 1.e4 — and the engine returns every game in the index that reached that position, sorted by how your target player responded.

So instead of memorising an opponent's opening moves from a list, you ask the right question: "What does he play here?" Set the board to the moment of your choice. Get the answer in seconds.

Try the position search No account required.

A small team of chess players who also happen to write software. We built chess-intelligence because we wanted it ourselves. We got tired of having less preparation than our opponents who had access to expensive database subscriptions.

The tool is free at its core — because preparation should not be a pay-to-win advantage. We may add optional features over time to keep the lights on, but the search will always be free.

Questions, suggestions, or game sources we should be crawling? hello@chess-intelligence.com

Ready to profile your next opponent?

No account needed. Just a name or a position.