What is Chess From Position?

Chess From Position is a tool to get chess positions from real games. These positions are obtained from games in the Lichess Open Database: specifically those games that include Stockfish analysis evaluations. By default, you get a position that is roughly equal.

Using the search settings, you can request a position based on Opening, the number of moves played and the evaluation at that position. You can move the pieces around on the board to explore the position and try out your ideas. The tool integrates nicely into Lichess features - you can bring up the Analysis Board, bring up 'Practice with Computer', or play a game against the AI. Finally, you can create an open ended challenge on Lichess which you can share with anyone and join them for a game.

Chess From Position has positions from Standard chess as well as Chess960.

Information in the following sections applies to both Standard as well as Chess960 positions, apart from anything to do with Openings. Anything related to Openings is relevant only in the context of Standard chess. For specific information related to Chess960, check out the Chess960 Positions section.

Features

• Get Position Get a random chess position from a real game. Returns a roughly equal position by default.
• Position Search Criteria Search by Opening, number of moves played to reach the position, and the Stockfish evaluation of the position. You an specify a general opening group (Opening (General)) OR a more specific opening (Opening (Specific)).
• Explore Position If you are like me, you want to dive right in when you see a new position, make some moves and explore ideas. You can do just that right here on the board. You can flip the board and move as Black or White.
• Get FEN and PGN You can copy the FEN of the loaded position and use it in any software or website of your choice. If you make any moves on the board, a PGN will be generated, and you can take that to any software or website of your choice as well.

Lichess Integration

Chess From Position integrates nicely with Lichess functionality. You can take the current position (with any changes you might have made) to:

• Analysis board
• Practice with the computer
• Play vs. AI Play against Stockfish with your choice of colour and engine strength.
• Open-ended challenge Create a challenge. Share the generated link with anyone and play against them. You can select the time control and choose to play rated or unrated.

Notes about the positions and search

The Lichess Open Database has millions of games, dating all the way back to January 2013. I haven't parsed all of them. Storage and processing constraints dictate how many positions I obtain and keep. At the moment I have roughly one million positions from the May 2024 file alone. I intend to parse more games over the course of coming weeks and months.

The list of openings in the openings selection box is extracted from the games parsed from the open database. There are a lot of openings, some quite obscure. If you select a specific opening, and the number of moves and a specific evaluation, it is possible that that combination does not exist in my position database. You will see an error in that case saying 'No matching FEN found'. If you encounter this error, you need to search with more relaxed criteria. For example, if you are interested in a specific opening, set the other two parameters to 'Any' and that should guarantee you a position.

For casual use, it is probably best to stick to the Openings (General) selection rather than the Openings (Specific) one.

The Stockfish evaluations are extracted from the PGNs stored in the database, I have not run a Stockfish evaluation on the positions myself. From what I understand, these evalutions can be at varying depths. In addition, I have rounded them off to the nearest integer. So when you search for positions with an evalution of 0 for example, the returned position might have any evaluation from -0.5 to 0.5.

Who Can Benefit from This Website?

This website should be useful for a wide range of chess enthusiasts, from beginners to advanced players.

• Avoiding Opening Theory If you are tired/wary of opening theory this is ideal for you. Jump directly into a middle-game position and carry on from there.
• Opening Theory Exploration Ironically, after what I said in the previous note, this can also be an ideal tool to strengthen your game around a specific opening. You can explore middle-game positions arising out of the opening of your interest to gain a deeper understanding of that opening and the kind of positions, pawn structures and motifs that can arise from it.
• Strengthen Your Defence You can choose positions where you are worse and learn defensive tactics and how to find defensive resources.
• Play Odds Games Use positions with non-zero evaluations to create odds games - these are ideal for players of differing strengths. You can now bring up a +3 position in your favour and challenge that higher rated friend of yours who refuses to play with you otherwise!
• Tournament Organisers Generate interesting starting positions for your tournament games - and make your tournament that little bit different and exciting.

Chess960 Positions

I added support for Chess960 positions in January 2025 based on user requests and my own interest in Chess960.

The first question is, what does having Chess960 positions achieve? Chess960 itself was designed to avoid opening theory, so what is the need to further dive into positions in Chess960 games? The simplest answer is: "because they're there!".

In my opinion, Chess960 is going to get more and more popular. It has been in the spotlight over the past year due to Magnus throwing his weight behind the Freestyle Chess Tour.

While studying opening theory for 960 opening positions is going to be a daunting task, there will be systematic efforts by players to study patterns that might be helpful. For example, you could say that Chess960 opening positions where the Knights start together in the corner, or positions where the bishops are in two opposite corners could be studied together to come up with some general ideas. Chess From Position aims to aid this by allowing users to quickly bring up positions from such opening configurations.

To access Chess960 positions, click on the down arrow next to the 'New Position' button, and select the Chess960 tab. Once that is selected, you can just hit 'New Position' to get one completely at random, or you can use the 'Starting Position Identifier' to specify a starting position. This will give you a random position from a game which had that starting position. You can search for the patterns you are interested in. For example if you want to look at starting positions where the bishops and knights are clumped together, you can search for 'bbnn' and the dropdown will narrow down the starting positions accordingly. If you know the Starting Position Id directly, you can just enter that. For example '959' - that is the last position (they go from 0 to 959).

Acknowledgements

I have used a lot of Open Source tools, software and resources in creating this website. I will create an exhaustive list soon, but these are some of the more prominent projects I have relied upon:

lichess.org

chess.js

chessboardjs

The chess pieces are courtesy of Cburnett, under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license, via Wikimedia Commons

Icons are from two sources:

• Font Awesome Free 6.5.2 by @fontawesome. Copyright 2024 Fonticons, Inc.
  Released under the Font Awesome Free License
• Bootstrap Icons
  Bootstrap is released under the MIT license and is copyright 2018 Twitter.

Contact

I would love to hear from you about this website. You can reach me at chessfromposition@gmail.com

I am fairly active on Lichess where I can be found at NishAz. I enjoy regular chess (mainly blitz) as well as Chess 960. I also love Antichess, but I haven't played that in a while.

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