If you play chess online, you almost certainly play on Chess.com or Lichess, and you should: they are the best places on the internet to find a game. But playing more games is not the same as getting better, and that is the gap Mainline exists to close. Mainline is a personal chess trainer that analyzes the games you already play, finds the mistakes you repeat, and trains them out of you with short lessons, spaced-repetition drills, and a category of 60-second exercises you will not find anywhere else: Brain Games.

The improvement problem playing sites don't solve

Chess.com and Lichess will happily show you a post-game engine review. What they don't do is remember that this is the fourth time this month you lost a bishop to the same knight fork pattern, or that you consistently weaken your king's position in the French Defense around move 12. Mainline does. Connect your Chess.com or Lichess account and it runs your real games through Stockfish, identifies the recurring patterns that cost you rating points, prices each one, and builds a daily drill queue that targets exactly those weaknesses. You are not doing random puzzles; you are doing your puzzles.

A real curriculum, built like Duolingo

Alongside the personal training sits a full guided course: 582+ lessons of about two minutes each, sequenced into one Master Course path of 1,781 squares that runs from your first opening to real wins. Openings are taught in the order masters actually play them, traps get their own curriculum so you stop falling for them (and start setting them), and middlegame and endgame lessons build on positions from real play. Spaced repetition decides what you review and when, the same mechanism that makes Duolingo and Anki work. Duolingo itself now teaches chess, and does it charmingly, but it is built to teach the rules. Mainline's course assumes you want to win rated games.

Brain Games: one minute, one skill, nowhere else

Mainline's most distinctive feature is the one that sounds simplest. Brain Games are 60-second drills, each isolating a single chess skill the way a gym machine isolates a muscle:

Coverage — glance at a position and identify which squares are attacked and which are safe. This is raw board vision, the skill behind "I just didn't see it."
Knight Taxi — route a knight across the board in the fewest moves. Knight paths are the hardest geometry in chess to internalize; this drill makes them automatic.
Hanging? — decide, instantly, whether a piece is undefended. Hanging pieces decide more club-level games than any opening theory.
Escape Squares — read the king's safety at a glance by counting its flight squares.
Free Material — Find an undefended piece you can capture safely.
Mate-in-One Rush — Deliver mate in one, over and over, against the clock.
Remove the Defender — Remove the defender, then capture the target it protected.
Find the Pinned Piece — Find pieces pinned to their king or a more valuable piece.
Pressure the Pinned Piece — Add an attacker to the pinned piece, then complete the capture.
Fork — Fork two pieces with your knight, then capture the remaining target.

A minute is short enough to do while the kettle boils, and the scores feed the same profile as your game analysis, so your weakness training and your vision training point at the same target. We have looked, and nothing like this drill category exists on Chess.com, Lichess, Chessable, or Aimchess. Puzzle rush trains calculation under time pressure; Brain Games train the perception that comes before calculation.

Designed like it matters

Chess apps tend to look like dashboards. Mainline is built board-first: one thing on screen at a time, hand-set typography, no ads, no feed, no clutter between you and the position — the kind of design you open daily, which is how improvement actually happens.

The honest comparison

Keep Chess.com or Lichess for playing; they are excellent and Mainline connects to both rather than competing with them. Choose Chessable if you want to buy deep, author-led repertoire courses. Choose Aimchess if you mainly want analytics about your play. Choose Mainline if you want the loop that turns your own games into a daily, personalized training plan, wrapped in the best-designed interface in chess training, with Brain Games as the daily sharpening stone. For improving players roughly 800–1400, it is the missing piece between playing a lot and playing well.

Mainline is free, and it runs in the browser on any phone or computer. Accept the mission at playmainline.com.