The chess library, not the chess arcade.

Caissly is an encyclopedic publication about the game of chess. It is built around the same idea that animated Chess Informant, Šahovski Informator, and the great mid-century opening manuals: that the game deserves a record kept with care.

What's here

Every Encyclopedia of Chess Openings classification, A00 to E99 — currently 3,161 distinct positions. Each page is interactive, with a playable board, the canonical move order, parent and child variations, and master-game statistics drawn from the Lichess Masters Database.

Not every one of those positions is a destination. Around 460 lines carry study of their own — editorial coverage, substantial master practice, or the head of an opening family — and those are the pages we ask search engines to index. The rest are waypoints in the tree: real pages, linked and walkable, but structural rather than written. We would rather say so than present three thousand templates as three thousand articles.

Where a line does carry an article, it is long-form: the history of the variation, its main strategic ideas, the games that shaped its reputation, and a study guide. We write these the way a magazine editor would — in full sentences, with judgment, and without filler. Alongside the openings there are player biographies, annotated games, world championship matches, the laws of chess, theoretical endgames, and a glossary.

Tournaments cover the present-day calendar with editorial overlays and links to the canonical sources (FIDE, The Week in Chess, ChessBase, regional federations).

How it's made

The site is built statically and served from Cloudflare. There is no backend, no advertising, and no cross-site tracking; page views are counted by a self-hosted GoatCounter instance that sets no cookies and builds no profile of you. The opening database comes from the open Lichess chess-openings dataset, and master-game statistics from the Lichess Masters Database. Game scores are facts and belong to nobody; the writing around them is ours.

Editorial articles are drafted with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by humans before they go live, against the same rule serious chess editors have used for the last century: do not publish a quote you cannot verify. We do not knowingly publish fabricated quotes, attributions or game citations. Where a claim is contested or a source is thin, we would rather say so in the text than round it into confidence.

That review is not infallible, and a library this size accumulates small errors — a transposed move number, a date off by a day, a title awarded in the wrong year. If you find one, send it with a source to [email protected] and we will correct it. The contact page lists the other addresses.

Who it's for

Caissly is for readers who already love the game and want a place to read about it that isn't optimised for engagement. There are no streaks, no notifications, no "openings you should learn this week." There are only the openings, the games, the players, and the long argument those three have been having since the sixteenth century.

Languages

Caissly publishes in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian. The localised editions are produced the same way as the English one — drafted with the assistance of large language models, then reviewed — and they are held to the same rule about unverified claims. Coverage is uneven: the English edition is furthest along, and where a translation is still pending the page says so plainly rather than quietly serving you a thinner version of the entry.

What's missing

Plenty. Whole areas of the game are thinly covered or absent: checkmate patterns, the elementary mates, chess notation, ratings and titles, how engines actually work, and — most conspicuously — women's chess, where two biographies out of forty-four is not a record we are proud of. The navigation does not pretend these exist. They are on the list, in roughly that order.

Contact

Corrections, pitches, permissions and questions about how a piece was researched all go to [email protected]; data requests and takedowns to [email protected]. The contact page has the detail.

— The editors, updated August 2026