I taught myself chess from 600 to 1850. Lumichess is how you climb faster.

Quitting at ten, starting again in a lockdown

I learned chess the way most kids do. Someone taught me the moves, I played a few school tournaments, and then I drifted away from the board after fifth grade. For more than a decade I barely touched it. When the 2020 lockdown emptied everyone's calendar, I went looking for something to fill the quiet hours and remembered the game I had abandoned. I came back rusty in the worst possible way. I hung pieces, walked into simple threats, and lost to the scholar's mate more than once. My Chess.com rating settled somewhere around 600 to 700, which is to say I was a beginner all over again.

Climbing from 600 to 1850 without a coach

I never did the things improvement guides tell you to do. I did not memorise an opening repertoire. I did not buy a course or hire a coach. I did not drill endgames or keep a study schedule. I just played, looked over my games for a few minutes afterward, and played again. Progress came in slow, uneven steps, and what kept me going was the scoreboard. Every hundred rating points felt like a genuine achievement, and every hundred after that was harder won than the one before. Crossing 1000, then 1200, then 1500 each delivered a small, real thrill. That is how I reached an 1850 peak on Chess.com, one stubborn rating point at a time, and earlier this year I earned my first FIDE rating.

What the climb actually taught me

Doing it the slow way taught me something I would not have believed at 600. Most of the rating I gained did not come from learning new ideas. It came from making fewer of the same mistakes. The blunders that cost me games were almost never exotic. They were the tactics I had seen a hundred times and still missed, the winning positions I let slip, the careless moves I played when the clock ran low. Getting better had less to do with adding knowledge and more to do with closing the gap between what I already knew and what I actually did at the board. The trouble was that finding that gap on my own was painfully slow. I had no clear picture of where I was leaking points, so I could not aim my limited practice at the things that would have helped the most.

I did not get better by studying more. I got better by missing the same things less often.

Why I built Lumichess

That frustration is where Lumichess began. I started building small tools to answer the questions I kept asking about my own games. Which mistakes do I repeat? Where in the game do I tend to fall apart? Which tactical patterns do I keep walking straight past? Every tool I built to settle one of those questions eventually grew into a feature. A way to review a single game move by move became the Game Report. A way to read across dozens of recent games and surface the patterns became the Profile Report. The puzzle trainer and the rest of it followed in the same way, each one born from a real need I had as a player who wanted to improve and did not know exactly how. Lumichess is the product I wish someone had handed me when I was stuck at 700.

How Lumichess helps you climb

The idea behind Lumichess is straightforward. You improve fastest when you stop guessing about what to work on. So Lumichess looks at the games you already play on Chess.com or Lichess and shows you the truth about them. The Game Report walks through any single game move by move, classifies every decision from brilliant to blunder, and explains the moments that decided the result. The Profile Report steps back and reads across your recent games to map your real strengths and weaknesses, covering openings, tactics, endgames, conversion, and time management. Instead of a vague feeling that you ought to be better, you get an honest, specific picture of where your points are going and what to fix first.

The mission: getting every player to 2000

My goal for Lumichess is ambitious on purpose. I want to help every player who uses it reach 2000. I believe that is genuinely within reach for almost anyone, not because the rating is easy to earn, but because the road to it is mostly consistent, well-aimed work, and work like that can be guided. Most players never get there for two reasons. They lack direction, and good coaching costs enough to stay out of reach. Lumichess exists to remove both obstacles. The long-term vision is an AI coach that does what a strong human coach does. It studies how you play, tells you plainly what is holding you back, hands you a focused plan for what to train next, and then measures whether that plan actually moved your results.

Who Lumichess is for

If you are rated under 2000 and you want to climb, Lumichess was built for you. Whether you are clawing your way out of the beginner ranks the way I was at 600, or fighting through the long plateau that traps so many players in the 1500s and 1600s, the aim is the same. Give you the clarity to see what is genuinely holding you back, and the focused practice that moves a rating. I am still on that climb myself, and Lumichess is the tool I am building to keep going.