About Luftchess
A chess coach built from your own games. Air for the king.
What Luftchess is
Luftchess is a web app that coaches you from your own games. It reads a player’s own online games, finds the moment in each that mattered, and explains one better idea in plain words, checked against the engine. Between games, it brings back the positions that keep going wrong, with the reason behind each move.
It is for adults who play online and want to understand their games. It is an invite-only beta for now, set up today for one player’s games. Accounts of your own are being built, and invitations open when they arrive.
The name
Luft rhymes with foot. It is the German word for air, and in chess it is the square you give your king by pushing a pawn, so a back-rank check cannot mate. Here the pawn went to h3, and h2 is the king’s air.
A small move made early, so that later there is room to breathe. That is the kind of chess Luftchess tries to teach: Air for the king.
In the spirit of Capablanca
The coaching follows the taste of José Raúl Capablanca: clarity, simplicity, pieces working together, and small advantages turned into wins with clean technique. One idea at a time, said plainly. Capablanca had no part in making Luftchess; the name “Capa” in the app is the coaching voice, not him.
Engine, template, language model: who does what
- The engine. Stockfish judges every move. Maia, an engine trained to play like people, is the sparring partner. The Lichess tablebase gives exact results with seven pieces or fewer.
- Templates. Most sentences in the app are templates filled from the engine’s lines: which piece, which square, which move comes next.
- A language model. Some opening plans and explanations were written with the help of Claude, a language model made by Anthropic, and each was checked against Stockfish before it was added. No part of the app sends your games to a language model today.
Which Luft
Luftchess is a web app that coaches you from your own games; it is not connected with other chess products that use the name Luft. Our only address is luftchess.com, and the name is always written as one word: Luftchess.
Official accounts
Luftchess’s official accounts elsewhere are listed here, and only here.
- None yet. Official accounts are listed here, and only here, once they open.
Contact
[email protected]. We read every message.