Transpositions Are Finally Here!

The most requested feature on our suggestion board (over 143 upvotes) is finally available: transposition support in explorers. This means that no matter how you reach a position, the shown games are based on the position itself (and not the move order used to reach it).

A transposition happens when the same chess position is reached through different sequences of moves. For example, two openings may start differently but eventually lead to an identical position on the board. With transposition support, ChessMonitor now correctly recognizes these positions as the same.

Until now, ChessMonitor primarily treated positions through move order. With this update, positions that are played through different move sequences can now properly merge together. This gives you a much more complete and accurate view of openings and positions.

You can already try this in both your personal explorer and the global database explorer.

A Technical Challenge

While this feature may seem straightforward for a chess player, supporting transpositions required major technical architectural changes.

So far, most of ChessMonitor relied on a single database system for nearly all data processing. To properly support transpositions, we had to redesign parts of how opening data is stored and introduce an additional database layer optimized specifically for position-based lookups.

This also significantly increased storage requirements. Back when ChessMonitor first started, it ran on a small $20/month server where this approach simply wouldn’t have been feasible. Today, with a much more powerful infrastructure, we were finally able to implement it properly.

This update also supports further improvements to the Ultra Database explorer. The new architecture enables much faster and more advanced filtering, which we’re already working on for upcoming updates.

Live Games (in beta)

We've also added support for live broadcasts in the ChessMonitor app, allowing you to follow ongoing tournaments directly from your phone. This feature is currently in beta and is powered by Lichess broadcasts. For now, live broadcasts are available only on our iPhone and Android apps as we test the feature and gather feedback. We are planning to bring live broadcasts to the ChessMonitor website as well.

Unlike many broadcast viewers, we went for a bit of a different style. You have one large board at the top and multiple smaller boards below in a list similar to other views in our app. That allows you to change the watched games more quickly!

We’ve also introduced a “fast scroll” feature to the live game view as well as to the view of finished games. By holding the back or forward button while moving to the left or right, you can quickly navigate through the moves of the game.

To kick things off, we're excited to feature the UzChess Cup 2026 in our new live broadcast section. Ten of the world’s top grandmasters will be competing! The first round starts on June 7. Be sure to tune in and follow the games live!

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As always, thank you for all the feedback and suggestions. Many of our improvements start as community requests. If you didn’t know already, you can also upvote ideas from other users on our Feature Suggestions page or even add ideas yourself.