TL;DR:

• Built-in engine evaluations in the explorer
• Stockfish 17.1 support, per-device engine settings
• New option: player vs. white/black win rates
• Better game view with line previews
• Masters Database hits 10 million games

Explorer Gets Built-In Evaluations

We’ve made several upgrades to engine evaluations and the opening explorer. Most notably, evaluations are now directly integrated into the explorer with a compact evaluation bar. You can now see evals next to your opening statistics as you browse through moves.

Our evaluation is a bit different from most tools. It works in two phases: first, the engine runs until depth 15 or for 3 seconds (whichever comes first). Then it continues calculating only the top moves.

The dot indicator (“·•·”) next to evaluation numbers shows which moves are currently being calculated by the engine. In the first phase, all moves are evaluated. During this phase, the engine is weaker (as it is calculating more moves), but we receive evaluations for all possible moves.

During the second phase, only the top moves are evaluated further. Depending on the value set for “Multiple Lines” in the engine settings, multiple moves will be evaluated (three by default).

This method offers a quick overview of all moves while still providing the best possible analysis on key lines.

Choose Your Engine: Stockfish 17.1 Support

We’ve upgraded Stockfish to its latest version: 17.1 (with NNUE support). You can now choose which engine ChessMonitor uses for local analysis. The default remains Stockfish 16 (classic, no NNUE) since the latest engine includes a 79 MB neural net file.

Engine settings are stored per device, so you can fine-tune performance for desktop vs mobile to use more threads and memory on desktop while limiting resource use on mobile.

We’ve also added caching: engine results are now saved while the page is open, so you won’t lose your analysis when toggling the engine off.

Player’s Perspective or White/Black View

You can now choose how win rates are displayed in the explorer:

• View them from the player’s perspective (green = good for player, red = bad),
• Or switch to White/Black win rates for a neutral view.

The option is available in your account preferences.

Improved Game Analysis

We’ve also upgraded the engine experience when viewing individual games. Now, when you hover over a move, you’ll see a preview of the engine’s suggested line. You can also expand it to show the full sequence of moves.

Like in the explorer, you can pause the engine and the latest calculations will remain visible. This makes it easier to study full lines without the engine continuing to run in the background.

Other Updates

The Masters Database was updated on May 1st and June 1st, adding nearly 100,000 games. With that, we’ve officially crossed the 10 million games mark, now sitting at 10,002,106 games.

We also removed Cloudflare Analytics and replaced it with a self-hosted instance of Umami, a privacy-focused alternative to classical analytics software like Google Analytics.

Lastly, the Elo Estimate feature now better accounts for different time controls. Fast games like bullet are now weighted appropriately when calculating your overall rating estimate.

---

Many of these ideas came directly from our community. For example, the ability to switch between white/black and player perspective in the explorer was a suggestion by Matt, a core member of the ChessMonitor community.

Thanks to everyone who has shared feedback, it helps shape the future of ChessMonitor. If you have suggestions or ideas of your own, come hang out with us on Discord!