About this site
Are you tired of losing right out of the opening, being bullied into trap lines, messing up against wild attacks you know can't be sound? Are you getting drawn into opening lines you don't know how to handle?
Well, then you are exactly where I am. And I built this site to fix it.
Chess Survival will find your weak spots and go after them, play you into trap lines and do everything to give you a hard time. It prefers lines where you do worse, based on your training history. It collects your blunders and recaps them with you.
Chess Survival is based on real lines played by real people on Lichess. It uses Stockfish for evaluation purposes in training rounds, but it will never play a line that has not been seen in a real game between humans. OK, there might be engine moves from cheater games that slipped through Lichess's filters. But that's it.
How to play
The purpose is to survive the opening. You play against the trainer, and the trainer follows lines from real games. If you blunder, it's game over. If you slide into a position two pawns down (-2.0), the game is over. You can continue the line with Stockfish at 1500 Elo, if you wish, but the training round is over and training is paused until you start the next round – your playing against the engine does not count towards your training. Every once in a while a recap round appears and gives you an opportunity to do better.
Questions nobody asked but I want to answer anyway
1) Why don't you show me a cookie banner where I can reject your cookies?
Because I don't have to. The only cookie this site sends to your browser is the session cookie that allows you to have a continuous training session, and that doesn't require consent. The site can't work without one.
2) What about friends, likes and dislikes, commenting, a forum? Where are your social media links?
None of this exists on this site. It's focused on opening training and nothing else. There are enough chess communities around; I am not interested in building a new one.
3) A free service? Is it going to be free forever?
To be honest, I fully expect this site to be for me and a handful of enthusiasts who find it great. I will not implement a paid tier for that. Be my guest. But if it actually takes off – well, then it will become expensive to run the site and I, like anybody else, have to make a living. So I might implement a paid tier anyway. But a free tier will always exist.
4) What do you know about me?
Your training rounds, your chess blunders, your recap items and your rating. With an account, also your username, a scrambled version of your password (not the password itself), and your email address if you gave one, used for nothing but resetting your password. No trackers, nothing loaded from other sites; your IP address only lands in a server log that forgets it after seven days. The details are in the privacy notice.
5) I have a suggestion, a question, a feature request. How can I contact you?
You can't. I don't have the resources to handle it. That's why there is no contact information. And that's why there is no FAQ either: how would I know what people actually ask… There is one exception: questions about your personal data go to privacy@chess-survival.com, and that address answers nothing else. You will hardly ever need it: you can download everything the site stores about you or delete your account in Settings.
What else?
I asked Opus 5.5 to roast my about page. Here it is, if you are up for it...
Credits
- Stockfish: the chess engine, by the Stockfish developers, stockfishchess.org.
- Stockfish.js 19.0.1: the WebAssembly build of Stockfish that runs in your browser, by Nathan Rugg and Chess.com. The site serves the release files unmodified; their source code is at github.com/nmrugg/stockfish.js (v19.0.1). Its neural network (“lite” net) is by Chris Bao (sscg13).
- Pieces: Cburnett, by Colin M.L. Burnett, under the BSD license.
- Lichess: games from the open database; opening end by the Divider of scalachess.
License
Stockfish and Stockfish.js are free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3. The full license text is here: GPL v3. You may copy, change and redistribute them under its terms; the source code of the exact version used here is linked above.