Chess Stamps is a new tool I’ve created for pulling statistics on your chess games played on Lichess. Soon after release, it was featured on the Lichess homepage feed and received over 1,250 unique users in the first week.

The tool combines two of my great loves (chess and statistics). It fills a need for me that I haven’t seen elsewhere: contextualizing your opening repertoire as it compares to the population. For example:

• What’s the most commonly played opening you’ve never played? (If you’re Magnus: Italian Game: Anti-Fried Liver Defense)
• What’s the least common opening that you’ve played? (If you’re Naroditsky: Vienna Gambit, with Max Lange Defense: Steinitz Gambit, Fraser-Minckwitz Defense)
• What opening do you play most as black, relative to the population? (If you’re Nihal Sarin: Ruy Lopez: Berlin Defense, l’Hermet Variation, Westerinen Line)
• What’s the deepest opening (number of moves) you’ve played? (If you’re Alireza: Grünfeld Defense: Exchange Variation, Sokolsky Variation)

I enjoy seeing the relative rarity of each opening—what % of games are the openings played in, and how rare is it? More info on the methodology is available in the webapp.

The theme comes from thinking of playing chess openings as collecting stamps: how large is your collection, and how rare are the stamps in it?

This was my first webdev project, and it was a lot of fun to put together. The code is open source. I welcome any feedback, either at my email address (kylegiddon@gmail.com), on the GitHub repo, or through this form (can be anonymous).