Everything people ask before they start training. For a fuller picture, read the About Mainline page or compare Mainline to other chess apps below.
Mainline is a personal chess training app that analyzes your real games and drills the specific mistakes you keep making. It connects to your Chess.com or Lichess account, runs Stockfish over your games, shows each recurring error's cost in rating points, and builds a daily spaced-repetition queue to fix your weakest patterns. It covers openings, traps, tactics, middlegame, and endgame, and is free to start with a Pro plan at $49.99/year.
You connect your Chess.com or Lichess account, and Mainline runs the Stockfish engine over your real games at depth 20 or higher to find recurring mistakes, then ranks them by how many rating points they cost you. Instead of six vague scores, you get one prioritized drill queue built from your actual blunders.
Yes. Right now everything on Mainline is completely free: every opening, trap, drill, and the full personal game analysis. No trial and no card required.
Mainline is built for improving beginner-to-intermediate players, roughly 800–1400 rating, who want to stop losing the same way over and over. It assumes you know how the pieces move and focuses on the patterns that decide games at that level.
Chess.com and Lichess are where you play chess; Mainline is where you fix what went wrong. Mainline doesn't host live games, it ingests the games you already played there, diagnoses your specific weaknesses, and trains them out with targeted drills.
Chessable sells courses and repertoires built by other people; Mainline builds your training from your own games. Both use spaced repetition, but Mainline's queue is generated from the mistakes you actually make, not from a pre-packaged course you have to pick.
Yes, every move, line, and variation shipped in Mainline is verified with the Stockfish engine at depth 20 or higher before it goes live. Nothing is hand-guessed, and openings are ordered by real master-game frequency rather than opinion.
No. Mainline runs in your browser and installs as a Progressive Web App (PWA) on iOS and Android, so you can add it to your home screen without an app store.
Yes. Mastered material re-enters your queue on a Leitner-style schedule (roughly 1, 3, 7, 14, and 30-day intervals) so patterns stick in long-term memory instead of being forgotten after one session.
Yes, you can start learning an opening or a trap instantly as a guest. Connecting Chess.com or Lichess unlocks the personalized weakness analysis, and signing up saves your progress across devices.
Openings, common opening traps, tactics (forks, pins, skewers, discovered attacks, back-rank mates, zwischenzug, removing the defender, zugzwang), middlegame plans and pawn structures, and endgames (opposition, king-and-rook mate, Lucena, and more).
Yes, every drill has an AI chat that takes the current position and explains the idea behind a move in plain English. Its job is to teach the reasoning, since the moves themselves are already engine-verified.