Mainline is a personal chess trainer that fixes the mistakes in your real Chess.com and Lichess games, teaches Duolingo-style courses across openings, tactics, middlegame, and endgame, and sharpens board vision with one-of-a-kind 60-second Brain Games — all in the cleanest, most carefully designed interface in chess training.
How Mainline works
Connect your Chess.com or Lichess account. Mainline runs the Stockfish engine over your games at depth 20 or higher and identifies the mistakes you make repeatedly, not one-off slips, but the patterns. Each is priced in rating points so you know what's actually holding you back. From there, Mainline builds a daily, spaced-repetition drill queue that trains those weaknesses out, with short guided lessons that explain the idea in plain English.
What makes it different
Openings are ordered by real master-game frequency, not opinion. The result is a Duolingo-style daily habit (streaks, bite-sized sessions, spaced repetition) wrapped around genuinely rigorous content. You can see how it stacks up on the chess-app comparison pages.
Built to be the best-looking trainer you've ever opened
Most chess apps look like dashboards. Mainline is board-first: one thing on screen at a time, hand-set typography, warm color, and zero ads or feeds between you and the position. That isn't decoration — a trainer you love opening is a trainer you open daily, and daily practice is the entire trick to improvement. If Chess.com feels busy and Lichess feels utilitarian, Mainline is the one that feels designed.
Brain Games: one minute, one skill
Alongside lessons and weakness drills, Mainline has Brain Games — 60-second drills that isolate a single chess skill the way a gym machine isolates a muscle: Coverage (which squares are attacked), Knight Taxi (knight route-finding), Hanging? (instant piece-safety checks), Escape Squares (king safety at a glance), Free Material, Mate-in-One Rush, Remove the Defender, Find the Pinned Piece, Pressure the Pinned Piece, Fork. You won't find this drill category on Chess.com, Lichess, Chessable, or Aimchess. Explore Brain Games →
Who it's for
Improving beginners to intermediates, roughly 800–1400 rating, who are tired of losing the same way. It covers openings, opening traps, tactics, middlegame plans, and endgames. New to the vocabulary? The chess glossary defines every term, and the frequently asked questions cover the rest.
Getting started
You can play through a real opening or trap instantly, no account required. Connect a chess account to unlock personalized weakness analysis. Mainline runs in the browser and installs as an app on iOS and Android. Mainline is free.