1900 online. 1450 over the board.
Where do the 450 points go?
Part of it is the rating scale — online runs high, every chess parent knows that. The rest is fixable: the mistakes that only surface over the board — time trouble, long-game drift, the patterns a kid repeats tournament after tournament. ChessIntel finds those and turns them into a plan.
Get the free first report Free first report. $50/month after, only if it earns it. No card to start. Or digitize a scoresheet →How it works
- Digitize. Photograph the scoresheet and it becomes a clean digital game in seconds — or type the moves.
- Link. Add your kid's Chess.com or Lichess username and their recent online games come in automatically. No PGN hunting.
- Analyze. A chess engine finds the turning points in every game; a coaching model explains them in plain language, grounded in what the engine actually saw.
- Improve. A report after each tournament names the patterns costing points and the one thing to fix next — and it remembers across games, so you watch them change.
What's in a report
- The turning points of the game — the moves that decided it, and the better move, from a real engine
- The recurring pattern across your kid's games — the leak costing the most points
- One concrete thing to work on next, with a drill from your kid's own position
- A coach's read in plain language — not a wall of engine numbers
- A fresh report after each tournament, each one building on the last
Why online and tournament games, together
Kids play far more online than over the board — and often better: faster, sharper, higher-rated. Reading those games next to the tournament games shows the real gap: what works online but vanishes under a long clock. That contrast is where the biggest, fastest improvement hides — and it is exactly what a single game, or a coach juggling thirty kids, tends to miss.
Every report builds on the last. The more games you send, the sharper the patterns get, and the sooner a mistake gets flagged before it costs points.
What a report looks like
██████ — Tournament Report
First, what you did well
██████, before anything else: online, you're playing genuinely strong chess. Across your last fifty rapid, blitz, and bullet games you scored about 70% against opponents rated 1820–1915 in a real range of openings — the Scotch (your weapon), the Petrov, Sicilians, the Italian — by attacking, calculating cleanly, and converting your edges. That's not a fluke rating; that's skill. And in your game against ████ you came out of the opening in good shape: a sound setup, no early damage, a position any 1900 would be happy with around move 20.
The big picture
Some of the 1900-online / 1450-OTB gap is just the rating scales — online numbers run high. But the part that's yours to fix is this: your game is built on speed and sharpness, which fast online play rewards. Over the board, with a long clock and an opponent who won't hand you tactics, the game slows down — and slow, quiet, plan-it-yourself positions are the part you haven't trained yet. That's good news: the gap isn't talent, it's a trainable skill.
Online vs over-the-board: what the contrast shows
Put your online games next to the ████ game and the pattern is almost too clean. Online, when there's a target, you're relentless. Your two online losses didn't come from being outplayed — they came from speed. Over the board the danger flips: you have time, but when the position goes quiet you don't yet have a method for making a plan.
The patterns costing you points
1. In quiet positions, you stop making plans. In the ████ game, moves 21–37, your queen wandered with no target while your opponent slowly took the c-file. A position equal at move 20 was clearly worse by move 38 — with no single mistake to point at.
Why it happens. Online, the position almost always tells you what to do. You've trained the skill of reacting to sharp positions, not creating a plan in a calm one…
Free first report — no card needed. $50/month after, only if it earns it.