Guides
CHESS
GUIDES
Practical, no-nonsense chess guides for club and tournament players who want to understand their games better — from reading a scoresheet correctly to the blunder patterns that cost the most rating points, plus guides to getting the most out of ChessDiary itself. Written by the ChessDiary team, drawing on patterns we see across thousands of imported games.
GUIDE 01
How to Read (and Keep) a Chess Scoresheet
Algebraic notation basics, the parts of a standard scoresheet, and the handwriting habits that make a game easy to recover later — or impossible to.
GUIDE 02
The Most Common Blunder Patterns in Club-Level Chess
Forks, back-rank mates, hanging pieces, and the in-between move — the handful of tactical motifs responsible for most lost games below master level.
GUIDE 03
Opening Principles Every Improving Player Should Know
You don't need to memorize theory to stop losing in the opening. Five principles that keep you out of trouble in the first ten moves.
GUIDE 04
How to Photograph a Scoresheet for Accurate OCR
Lighting, angle, and framing habits that make the biggest difference to how accurately ChessDiary reads a handwritten scoresheet.
GUIDE 05
How ChessDiary Reads Messy Handwriting (and When It Can't)
What parse confidence means, the most common handwriting misreads, and what to do when a scoresheet comes back uncertain.
GUIDE 06
PGN Import vs. Chess.com/Lichess Sync: Which to Use
The difference between uploading a single PGN and linking your account for bulk history sync, and when each one is the right call.
GUIDE 07
How to Read a Stockfish Blunder Report
What quality labels, centipawn loss, and tactical motifs actually mean — and how to use them to study a loss instead of just skimming it.
GUIDE 08
What Happens When the Analysis Engine Is Unreachable
ChessDiary automatically falls back to Gemini AI when the Stockfish server can't be reached. Here's exactly what changes.