The Chesslinebook Guide

01 · Getting started

Web, phone apps, accounts, and sync.

The app lives at chesslinebook.com/app and runs the same everywhere: in any browser, installed to your home screen as an app, or as the native iPhone (TestFlight) and Android (Play) builds. Everything works offline once loaded — the engine is bundled.

Signing in (optional)

• Email code — enter your email, type the one-time code it sends you. No passwords.
• Google — one tap, on the website.
• Class code — for kids in a scholastic club: the coach's code plus a first name. No email, no personal information (see Coaches & students).
• Signed out — completely fine. Everything saves in your browser; sign in later and it comes with you.

Signed in, your notebooks, drill progress, and puzzle bank sync across devices. Sync is conflict-safe — editing on two devices keeps both versions — and offline edits queue up and replay when you're back online.

02 · The home screen

One question: what do you want to do?

• On a desktop the home is Today: one card that says what to do next and roughly how long it takes (▶ Drill 7 lines, ▶ Solve 3 puzzles or ▶ Practice), your streak and daily target under it, then three tiles — Puzzles, Analyze a game, Play — a This-week strip (lines drilled, puzzles solved, streak, lines due), and on the right your notebooks with their due counts. The first time you see a three-step checklist instead — Analyze a game → Save your first fix → Drill it — with one button for the current step, and a short three-stop tour of the rail (Skip is always there). Once the steps are done, or if you already have notebooks and history, it becomes Today.
• Your coach's notes — when a coach has left a note you haven't read, a coral 👨‍🏫 Your coach left a note banner sits under the Continue button naming the game; tap it to open the note. In the apps, pull down on the home screen to refresh your notebooks, notes and badges.
• Train — Drill, Play (a rated game against a bot at your level), Practice, Puzzles and Opening mistakes (the rescan-and-drill of your online games), each tile showing one live fact: what's due, what's waiting, how many leaks are on record.
• Study — Notebooks (your repertoire and imported games), Analyze a game, My report (shown once you have games) and Library (the built-in main lines and starter packs).
• Bring games in — Import games; a new-games tile appears once you've scanned a Lichess or Chess.com username and there are games you haven't reviewed; coaches also get Students and Inbox here.
• Your notebooks live one tap away — the Notebooks tile, the rail's Notebooks item, or ‹ Notebooks from a notebook's list (from inside a game, ‹ Back returns to that list first) — as the grid of everything you've built with the Library and starter packs under it. ↕ Arrange reorders them; the order syncs.
• 🔥 Streak card — now at the top of My report: a ring for today's goal (five drill actions a day: drilled lines, practice runs, and puzzles all count), your streak, and a heatmap of the last 16 weeks. The streak survives until midnight of a missed day; the flame also shows in the home status line.
• Getting around — on a desktop a rail down the left side holds four items in the order you use them: Analyze (the free game report) · Train (the home: drills, puzzles, practice) · Notebooks · Play. At the bottom, You opens a menu with Sign in or your profile, My report, Students and Players & coaches, Inbox, Import games, Help and Settings; the 🔔 bell (games shared with you) sits beside it. On a phone the same lives in a tab bar along the bottom — Home · Notebooks · Drill · Puzzles · You — and the phone home is the launcher: a status line, one ▶ Continue button, then a tile for each thing you can do.

03 · Notebooks

One notebook per opening, per season, per student — however you like to organize.

The contents list

Opening a notebook shows a list of everything inside: games with their result WON LOST, date, move count, comment count, and 🎯 rating chip; lines with their study-progress bar and due-for-review state. Tap an entry to open it; ‹ Back returns to the list with your place kept. Favorites stay at the top: open a game, tap ⋯ → ☆ Favorite, and it wears a gold ★ in the list (and in the switcher above the board). Favorites are saved with the notebook, so they sync across your devices and a coach reading your notebook sees them. Tap ⋯ → ★ Unfavorite to let it go. A notebook with a single entry skips the list.

The list grows tools as the notebook grows:

• Past ~10 games — a search bar (opponent or opening) and filter chips with live counts: All · Won · Lost · Draw · ★ favorites · 💬 commented · 🎯 rated.
• Past ~50 games — a scoreboard: your total record (tap 118W, 79L, or 15D to filter to just those games), a form strip of your last twelve results, and your average 🎯 rating. The list becomes a ledger — month sections with their own mini-records, a win/loss color stripe on every row, and your most-played openings appear as filter chips automatically.

Notes on every line and game

📝 Under the moves, each line and game has its own notes box: tap it, write (markdown works — headings, lists, checklists, tables), and it saves as you type. Notes travel with the line through Move, Merge, share links, export and print. The notebook-wide notes are still there as Notebook notes beneath it, and opening names in either become clickable links to the matching line.

The ⚙ notebook menu

Grouped by intent: Organise (edit, duplicate, manage games, move lines, merge lines, merge into…), Share (link, export, import file, print, students, instructors), Improve (import games, check online games, tune lines, guide), and the two you rarely want at the bottom (hide, delete).

• ✎ Edit rename the notebook and its notebook notes (markdown — headings, lists, checklists, tables). Opening names in your notes that match a line become clickable links that load it on the board.
• ⧉ Duplicate — also how you make an editable copy of a read-only notebook.
• 🔗 Share as link — the whole notebook travels inside the URL; whoever opens it gets their own editable copy. Nothing is uploaded.
• ↓ Export / ↑ Import file — portable PGN in and out.
• 🖨 Print / PDF — an ink-friendly repertoire sheet with diagrams; the puzzle bank prints as a worksheet with answers on the last page.
• Three ways to see your lines — the contents list has a ☰ list, a ▦ grid (a card per line with a mini board of where the line ends, oriented for the side you play), and a ≡ table; each shows a line's length (every move, variations included) and, when it has variations, how many. A sort menu orders them by name, length, least-studied or due-first; "Notebook order" is the order you set yourself. Your choice sticks on that device.
• ↕ Arrange — in notebook order, tap Arrange to reorder lines: ▲▼ on each line, or drag them on a desktop. The order is saved into the notebook, so the ‹ › buttons on the line card follow it too.
• 🧹 Manage games and 📦 Move lines — tick several entries to delete or move between notebooks in one go.
• ⛙ Merge lines — combine several lines into one line with variations: tick them, name the result (prefilled from what their names share, e.g. "King's Gambit Declined: Lines"), and the first ticked becomes the main line while the others graft on as variations wherever they diverge — moves they share are merged, comments and glyphs kept. Each line's name is kept as a comment on the move where it branches off, so a merged "King's Indian Defense: Lines" still says Sämisch Variation on 5.f3. The originals are removed unless you tick Keep the original lines too. Drill history carries over, since it's keyed by position. Its inverse is ⇗ To new line on any move.
• ⤵ Merge into… — fold a whole notebook into another (say, your King's Indian notebook into your Black repertoire). Every line and game moves across with its drill history and coach notes, the notebook notes are appended under a heading, and the old notebook is deleted — tick Keep this notebook too to merge a copy instead. Sharing follows the notebook you merge into.

04 · Building your repertoire

Lines are the moves you intend to play — and drill.

Adding a line

Tap + Line. Name it (the app suggests named book continuations from wherever you're standing), then either:

• Build on the board — tap or drag pieces; every move is recorded. Playing a second move from the same position starts a variation.
• 📋 Paste a PGN — the collapsed "Have the moves already?" option in the same dialog. Variations and {comments} survive intact, pasting several games creates several lines, and PGNs copied from chess.com's analysis board come in clean (the bare eval comments are stripped).

The dialog also asks which color you play the line as — choose ⚫ Black and the line lands in a Black tab with the board flipped and drills playing White's moves at you. You can also import a whole Lichess study — each chapter becomes a drillable line, tabbed White/Black from its orientation, comments and custom start positions intact.

Comments & editing

On a desktop the header bar has a Browse · Study · Edit switch. A line opens in Browse — just the board and the moves, for reading a line through without distraction. Study is the full view: eval bar, coverage, analysis, notes and the comment box. Your choice is remembered on this device. Edit is the editing mode described below (greyed out in the read-only sample notebooks). On phones the ✏️ button in the transport row still enters and leaves Edit.

• Comment any move — no Edit mode needed. On every game and line in your own notebooks the comment box is open in Browse: tap a move, write, it saves as you type. Quality glyphs (!, ?!, …) sit in the row above the note.
• Reshaping moves stays behind ✏️ Edit: ▲ Promote makes a variation the main line; ⇗ To new line copies a variation out into its own entry; Delete from here prunes.
• 📊 In your games shows what you and your opponents actually play from the current position — from your own imports, offline. An optional free Lichess API token adds global popularity and win rates.
• The trap library (~catalogued pitfalls) warns about common traps in the openings you play.

05 · Importing & reviewing games

Your real games, graded move by move.

Getting games in

+ Game opens the import box: pull recent games from Lichess or Chess.com by username (page back through older games 20 at a time), or paste any PGN. If your username is on one side, the app knows which color you played. Games you already have are marked "already imported" — ticking one refreshes your existing copy (adding move times) instead of creating a duplicate; your comments and analysis stay put.

⏱ Move times

Imported games carry each player's clock, and the app shows the time spent on every move as a small label after it — Nf3 12s, Bb5 1:31 — so the long thinks jump out. In a game's move table each label also draws a thin bar scaled to your longest think of the game. Times sync with the game, and your coach sees them on anything you share.

Reading a graded game

The bundled Stockfish engine judges every move — offline; cloud evaluations and opening-explorer data layer in when online. The move list uses the same language as the big sites:

Landing on a flagged move shows a plain-English coach note ("Blunder. This goes from clearly better to lost. Better was Re6.") with an amber arrow for the better move beside the green best-reply arrow. Tap ⓘ symbols on the tab bar any time for the legend.

Games show their moves in a two-column table — move numbers down the side, White and Black in their own columns — with the quality marks, book icons and think-time bars inline, the way the big sites lay out a game review. Lines keep the flowing list, which reads better for variation-heavy prep.

Want the whole story at once? 🔎 Full game report — top right of the header on a desktop, beside the result under the board on a phone — opens the free analyzer with the game already loaded: a deeper engine pass with accuracy for both sides, a move-quality grid, key moments, and the lesson behind each mistake. It opens inside the app, under the app's own header, and ‹ Back returns you to the exact game you were on. The analyzer is also one tap from the home screen (🔬 Analyze a game) for any Chess.com or Lichess game — yours or anyone's.

Exploring on the board

In a game, pieces move freely in Browse — no Edit toggle needed. A move matching the game steps forward; a new move starts a variation you can analyse. ‹ takes an experiment back, and the 💾 Save to notebook chip files a find into one of your opening notebooks.

On your phone

Games use a one-screen layout: board on top, then a tabbed panel — Moves / Analysis / Notes — that gets nearly half the screen, so longer comments read comfortably. The Notes tab shows this game's own notes first, with the notebook notes folded beneath. The evaluation graph becomes a drag-to-jump scrubber pinned below.

06 · Practice, drills & rated play

Two trainers, and a full game when you want to test it.

🎯 Practice

The app plays the other side of a line, and every variation is its own run: a line with three branches is practised as three runs, main line first, and the finish says "Variation 2 of 3 complete — next variation ↓". ▶ Next variation goes to the next branch of the same line; once they're all done the button becomes ▶ Next line. The opponent's replies follow the branch being practised, and the label under the title says which variation you're on. At one of your own forks, a run only accepts the move of its variation — play your usual main-line move there and it says so, so a variation that starts with your move actually gets practised. Completed branches are remembered per device, so a fresh start resumes at the first one you haven't finished. When your line runs out you can keep playing against the engine from that exact position — or tap ✏️ Add moves to this line to extend your prep right where it ended. The engine's eval bar sits beside the board the whole time, and the finish line gives the final position's verdict in words — "White is slightly better at +0.3", or "Roughly equal at −0.2, though Black has the more comfortable position: the bishop pair" — with reasons read straight off the board (material, the bishop pair, development, king safety, pawn structure, space).

📆 Drill (spaced repetition)

Lines come due on a schedule; every move is scheduled on its own — in the main line and in every variation — so only the moves you actually miss come back soon. A drill walks one branch per pass, steering the opponent's replies toward the moves that are due, and a line with due moves left on other branches comes round again in the same session. Mastery is tracked per line. The drill pace setting caps how many lines come due per day so drills never avalanche:

• Light — up to 6 lines a day
• Standard — up to 15 (the default)
• Intense — no cap

On a desktop a drill takes the whole screen — no header, no rail, the board centred with the prompt beside it — so nothing competes with the position. Most-overdue lines come first, and finishing your drills flows straight into any waiting puzzles. The cap is per day, not per notebook, and it counts lines drilled on any of your devices. Once today's target is reached the home page says so — "Daily drill target reached · N lines wait for tomorrow" — instead of offering a drill; Practice is never capped, and switching the pace to Intense in ⚙ Settings lifts the cap at once. To over-study, tap 🔁 Overstudy — on the home page, or in the toast when the Drill button is blocked — and the cap is ignored for the rest of today; your pace setting doesn't change and the cap is back tomorrow. When nothing is due at all, Overstudy drills your lines anyway — from every notebook, as White and as Black, in random order; positions that aren't due yet aren't re-graded, so your schedule is untouched.

The line being drilled is named above the prompt ("📖 Sicilian Defense: Smith-Morra Gambit · you play Black"), and under it the opening book names the position on the board as the line unfolds — "📖 B21 Sicilian Defense: Smith-Morra Gambit" — so a line called "Sicilian Defense: Lines" still tells you which variation you're in. Spot a move you want to change? Tap ✏️ Edit this line at any point in the line (in Drill or Practice): the run ends and you're standing on that very move in the board's Edit mode — play moves on the board to add them, or use Delete from here in the move panel — with the move list right there. The notebook's raw PGN text is still available under ⚙ → Edit notebook.

♟ Rated play — find your rating

The Play tile opens a full game against the app's own bot, and unlike everywhere else in the app there is no evaluation bar and no hints — it's just chess. You don't pick a level: the bot plays at your rating, so games land near a coin flip, which is where a single game tells us the most. There is a floor to that — the built-in engine can't credibly play below 1100. Even at its weakest it never hands you a piece and it takes every piece you hand it, so pretending it was an 800 would only have meant pricing your losses as if they came against an equal. Below 1100 you're the underdog on purpose: a loss costs a point or two and a win is worth a lot, which is exactly how a rating should treat an uphill game. Your rating is shown with its uncertainty — 1480 ± 90 — and the band narrows as you play; about ten games settle it. If you've imported your own online games, the first rating starts from those instead of from nothing.

The bot follows your rating by default, or pick a fixed Opponent level if you'd rather choose your own challenge — either way the game is rated. Captured pieces and the material score sit beside each player, as on any board. Start over on the Play page clears your rating and its record if you want a clean run — saved games stay in your notebooks. A clock is optional: pick a time control before you start — 3+2 up to 30 minutes — or No clock and take as long as you like. Both clocks show beside the board, the one that's running is highlighted, and running out of time loses the game like any other loss. Resign is there whenever you want it. There is no draw against the bot — nothing to offer and nothing to claim. A game ends by checkmate, stalemate, resignation, the clock, or the laws of chess that end a game on their own: no mating material left, fivefold repetition, the 75-move rule.

What makes it different from a rating anywhere else: it reads how you played, not only who won. After each game the result and your play quality are shown as separate lines, and the wording is exact about what they do. The result decides the direction; quality only changes the size. Lose to an even opponent and you might drop 8 — but if you played above your level you'd only drop 4, shown as "kept 4". A loss always costs rating and a win always pays; playing well can never turn a loss into a gain. It works the other way too: lose badly and it costs more than 8, and win a game your opponent threw away and you give some of it back.

Only real decisions count toward the quality reading — book moves, forced recaptures and moves in an already-decided position prove nothing about you, so they're skipped, which is why a short game often says "too few real decisions to read" and lets the result stand on its own. When the game ends, 💾 Save to notebook files it like any other game, ready to analyse.

👥 Play a friend

The other half of Play is a game against a real person — a coach and a student, on whatever devices each of you happens to have. It's a game that's live when you're both there and waits patiently when you're not: close the laptop mid-game and nothing is lost, and the board catches up the moment the other person moves. Invite anyone you follow, any of your students, or anyone you've exchanged messages with — a student who has shared notebooks with a coach can play that coach without either of you publishing a profile.

What makes it worth using instead of any other board: you can both write notes on the moves as you play. A note lands on the move that was just played and shows up on the other person's screen; the coach's notes appear in red, the same as instructor annotations everywhere else in the app. When you're done, 💾 Save to notebook files the game with every note already attached to its move as a PGN comment — so the lesson is a notebook entry you can come back to, drill from, or send on.

Everything else a game needs is there too: ½ Draw offers your opponent a draw (they see it on their screen and can accept, decline, or let a move withdraw it), Resign ends it, and the same « ‹ › » arrows under the board let you look back over the moves mid-game without losing your place — a move arriving snaps you forward to it.

These games are unrated on purpose: takebacks and "try that again" are the point of playing your coach, and they'd ruin a rating.

⚖️ Tune lines (report card)

⚙ → ⚖️ Tune lines judges every variation of every line in the notebook: the engine's verdict on where it ends, stated for your side ("+0.4 for you"), the reasons read straight off the board (material, the bishop pair, development, king safety, pawn structure, space), and — when one of your own moves cost a third of a pawn or more — a ⚠ Weakest move marker you can tap to stand on that position and fix it. Moves that stay in the opening book are never weak spots: a gambit's defining move costs eval by design, so the report states it as a note ("📖 2. f4 (King's Gambit) gives 0.6 by the book — the opening's price") and grades each variation against the eval where your book run ends. Green means better outright, or equal with the comfort on your side; amber holds the opening's ground; red loses ground past it, or has a costly move of yours after book ends. Your opponent's moves are your assumptions about what they'll play, so a generous reply is noted but never counts against the line. The quick pass spends under a second per position and reuses anything already evaluated; 🔬 Look deeper re-checks everything with a longer search. Tapping a weak spot also opens the fix chips beside the board: the engine's best alternatives to your move, each with its eval for you and the opening it leads into. Tap a chip to preview it with the expected reply; ✓ Use grafts it in as the main line (with that reply) and keeps your old move as a variation — nothing is rewritten for you. After a fix the report re-runs for that line by itself, and ⋯ → ⚖️ Tune this line under the board re-checks any single line after you've edited it — positions already evaluated are instant, so only the new moves cost engine time. 📚 Whole notebook widens a single-line report back out.

07 · Puzzles from your games

Your own mistakes, turned into training.

Tap 🧩 Generate Puzzles in any notebook with games (or the 🧩 tab on a phone). Every graded blunder, every missed win, and every missed tactic — a fine-looking move that skipped a forced mate or a material-winning shot — becomes a "find the better move" puzzle, scheduled with the same spaced repetition as your lines.

• Runs in the background — close the scan and it keeps grinding behind a floating 🧩 pill; the pill announces "✓ Scan done · N new puzzles" and the home screen count updates the moment it finishes. Re-scans skip games already processed.
• Random order each session, so you learn positions, not sequences.
• Missed wins and missed tactics are fair — "you were winning and let it slip" and "there was a forced checkmate here" get their own prompts, and when more than one move keeps the win (or mates, or wins the material), the alternative is accepted rather than marked wrong.
• Follow-ups explain themselves — after you solve one, the engine's continuation plays out with a plain-English line: "Why it works: you win a rook and a knight for a pawn, and the position ends up winning (+5.2)." Every word is computed from the actual position. The line is also steppable: tap any move in it (or use ◀ ▶) and the board jumps there, with a one-line note per move — "Takes a pawn, with check." · "The engine's best defense here." Solved with an accepted alternative? Step forward and the engine's idea replaces your move on the board.

08 · Reports & the 🎯 rating chip

The big picture across all your games.

• 📊 My report — win/loss overview, then what you do well and where to improve, each a habit counted across your graded games: converting wins, fighting back from lost positions, clean games, how fast you develop (minor pieces still at home at move 10), castling early, attacking before you've finished developing, rushing (mistakes on moves played in five seconds or less), time trouble, long thinks that don't help, opening mistakes, how deep you stay in theory, endgame accuracy, missed tactics and hung pieces. A signal only speaks when it repeats across a few games; "By the numbers" lists every measurement. Below that: the coaching summary (the biggest reason you lose, the mistake you repeat, your top-3 fixes) and weak spots by opening. The scan can be sent to the background (🔎 pill) while you keep using the app.
• 📉 Opening leaks — every scan feeds an aggregate ledger of the deviations you keep repeating across all games, worst first.
• 🎯 "Played like ~1850" + accuracy — every analysed game estimates the rating range your moves resembled (from the win-probability cost of your real decisions; opening theory, forced moves, and dead positions excluded — but throwing away a won game counts in full) and shows an accuracy percentage scored the way the big sites do it: every evaluated move counts, and one blunder still costs real points. Tap the chip for how both work. Both travel with the game across devices and show in the notebook list.

🔬 The free analyzer (chesslinebook.com/analyze)

One tap from the home screen (🔬 Analyze a game) — or straight from a browser, no account needed. Paste a Chess.com or Lichess game link, a username (it lists recent games and can analyse the last five together), a PGN, or a file, and Stockfish runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded. On a wide screen the note about each move sits beside the move list, which scrolls inside its box; on a phone the note sits under the board.

• The full report — accuracy dials for both sides, the 🎯 rating estimate, a Won/Lost badge, and a three-sentence story of the game.
• Charts that scrub — the eval graph, both players' clocks (with a sub-30-second panic band), and the material balance; drag any of them and the board follows.
• Save the report — 💾 Save to notebook at the top of a report files the game into your My Games notebook with every glyph, the engine's evaluation of every move and the lessons on the key moments, so opening it in the app shows the analysis at once and 🔎 Full game report comes back instantly. Analyzing the same game again replaces the numbers. Signed in, 📤 Share with coach saves it and sends the same report to your coach. The analyzer also keeps your recent reports on this device under the input box — tap one to reopen it instantly.
• Notes on a move — click any move in the report and a note box appears under the move's caption. Your note is saved with the report (and with the game, once it is in your notebook — opened from a notebook game, it goes straight onto that move). A coach who opens a game you shared sees your note there and can leave their own on the same move; you see theirs above the box, marked 👨‍🏫. In the notebook the three voices are kept apart: your words in the blue block, your coach's in the coral block with their name, and the engine's lesson in a grey block marked 🤖 Engine — the comment box only ever holds your own words.
• Key moments — every blunder, mistake and missed chance on its own board with the better move as a green arrow, how long you spent on the move, a plain-English lesson, a 🎯 Guess the better move drill, and ＋ Add to my LineBook to turn it into a drillable line in the app — you pick which notebook it goes into.
• A narrated player — step through the game and every move gets a sentence under the board: book status and the line's name, the verdict, and what the move does (castles, trades, develops, attacks, pins, escapes danger, pushes toward the king…). Your moves say "you", the opponent's say "they" — and nothing is guessed, only what the board and the engine show.
• Opening theory — where you left book, which named line theory continues into, and a step-through of the theory you didn't play, marked right on the board — at every fork the book's other moves appear as chips, so if you always play c4 where the line shows Bd3, one tap follows your move instead — and when the engine likes a move the catalog doesn't know (its top line, or a second line rated about equal), a 🤖 chip offers it with its eval.
• Sharing — one 📤 Share sheet: image cards (a square post, a 9:16 story for Instagram, or the player radar), a GIF replay of the whole game that slows down over the last few moves and ends on a ChessLineBook card, a link that opens this report with the game loaded (platform games unfurl in chat apps with their own scoreboard), the annotated PGN, and — signed in, inside the app — 👨‍🏫 Send to coach.

09 · Coaches & students

The whole coach suite is free.

For students

• Add your coach's email under ⚙ Settings → Instructors. Choose which notebooks they see with ⋯ → Share with instructors.
• 📤 Share one game — ⋯ → Share with my coach sends a single game (with an optional note). It also shares the notebook it lives in: your coach sees the notebook's lines and the games you've shared — your other games stay private — and can write notes on the moves. The share tracks your later edits automatically.
• Finding a coach's note. In the notebook's game list, a game your coach has commented on wears a coral 👨‍🏫 2 chip, marked new until you open it; the 👨‍🏫 filter chip shows only those games. Tapping the notification opens the game at the note. Once you've opened every noted game, the notebook's badge on the home screen clears.
• Coach notes are yours to keep or clear. A note your coach leaves on a move shows in red with a ✕ — once you've taken it in, tap ✕ to remove it from your notebook (it asks first; your coach keeps no copy).
• Your coach only sees what you share. When a coach opens your notebook, the game list shows only the games you've shared with them — with a banner saying so — and unshared games are simply absent.

For coaches

• Student notebooks — a roster of everything shared with you, with each student's last-practiced status. Opening a student shows their shared notebooks and games.
• Comment without Edit mode — tap any move in a student's game and write; your note appears to them in red with a "from your coach" cue. Notes never touch their moves.
• The 🔔 bell lands you in the right place — opening a shared game takes you into the student's live notebook when you have instructor access (write notes, add variations, right there). Without notebook access you get the share's copy, which is still explorable: move pieces freely, ‹ takes experiments back, and 💾 saves a line into your own notebook.
• Assign repertoires — send a notebook to a student in one tap, straight from a weak spot in their report.
• Class codes — mint a code in Settings; kids join with the code plus a first name. No email, no passwords, no personal information. Their notebooks auto-share to you, and class accounts are excluded from every social feature at the database level.
• Contact details — publish a phone and/or email as tap-to-call / tap-to-email links on your coach page. Blank fields are hidden and deleted from the server.

10 · Profiles, community & messaging

All opt-in, email accounts only.

• Public profile — photo, bio, and a unique @handle (⚙ Settings → Public profile). Published profiles get a live page at chesslinebook.com/users/<handle> (coaches: /coaches/<handle>) with link previews and follower counts. One toggle unpublishes.
• 👥 Community — search and follow players and coaches; you get a toast when someone follows you; tap your follower count to see who.
• Coaches near me — coaches opt in with a zip code (stored as a city-center point only, never an address); search by zip or GPS within 20 miles. Your search location is never stored.
• 💬 Messaging — DM any published profile. Unfollowing someone stops their messages (enforced in the database, both directions); message bodies can't be edited after sending; blocking and reporting are built in. New messages can also email you (on by default, at most one email per person per hour).
• Share games to your profile — an explicit per-game action (📣 Share to my profile); notebooks themselves stay private. Unshare any time.

11 · Notifications

What rings your phone, and what doesn't.

On the iPhone and Android apps, three things raise a real notification on a closed phone: a game shared with you, a coach's comment on your move, and a direct message. In the browser, the 🔔 and 💬 badges are the fallback — and message emails cover web-only users (a phone that gets the push skips the email, so you're never notified twice).

On iPhone, the red app-icon badge means "something arrived while you were away" and clears when you open the app; the in-app 🔔/💬 badges remain the record of what's still unread.

12 · Settings & appearance

Everything saves as you type — there are no Save buttons.

• Theme — Obsidian (the default: ink-dark with a cobalt accent and gold for anything due), Midnight (the previous look), Slate, Charcoal, Ocean, Plum, or Paper (light).
• Board & pieces — six board colorways (Slate — the default, Green, Brown, Blue, Gray, Walnut) and four piece styles: Tournament (the classic set from books and the big sites — the default), Classic, Neo, and Outline.
• Glyphs — show the core set or every annotation.
• Account — Sign out, or Delete my account…: type DELETE to confirm and the account with everything stored under it (notebooks, progress, profile, messages, shares) is removed at once and permanently. Anything you exported as PGN stays with you.
• Drill pace — Light / Standard / Intense (see Practice & drills).
• Instructors, class codes, public profile, messages — covered in their sections above.
• Your data — one click downloads every notebook as portable PGN plus a complete JSON backup (notes, drill history, puzzle bank). No lock-in, and account deletion is available any time.

13 · Keyboard shortcuts

On a desktop keyboard.

14 · Tips & troubleshooting

The small print that saves a support email.

• Updates apply on the second launch. The app updates itself in the background; if you know a new version just shipped, close and reopen once more. On the phone apps, the first launch after a store update shows a ✨ What's new screen with the release notes — dismiss it and it won't return until the next update.
• Offline is a feature, not an error. The board, engine, drills, and puzzles all work with no connection; cloud-only extras (explorer stats, sync, community) quietly wait for you to come back online.
• Share links contain the notebook. A 🔗 share link is the data — anyone with the link gets their own copy, so treat it like handing over the file.
• Backgrounded scans keep going. The 🧩 puzzle scan, 📊 report, and 🔎 weakness analysis all keep working behind their floating pills while you do something else; the pill tells you when they're done.
• Read-only notebooks (the built-in library, samples you've kept, games shared with you) can always be ⧉ Duplicated into an editable copy of your own.
• Kids' accounts are deliberately limited. Class-code accounts have no email, no profile, no messaging, and can't be found in the directory — by design, enforced in the database.

15 · Safety & reporting

Tools for when another user crosses a line.

Blocking

• Stop someone's messages — in the message thread, open ⋯ and tap 🔇 Stop messages. It silences the conversation in both directions, enforced in the database, and also unfollows them. 🔊 Allow (or following them again) undoes it.
• Unfollowing someone also stops their messages — leaving quietly is enough; you never have to confront anyone.

Reporting a user

1. Open their profile (from the community directory, a message thread, or anywhere their name appears).
2. Tap the small 🚩 flag in the bottom-right corner of the profile card.
3. Pick a reason, add details if you like, and submit.

Reports go straight to the Chesslinebook team and are reviewed against the community rules. The reported user is not notified that you reported them.

Kids are protected by design

Class-code accounts (used by scholastic clubs) have no email, no public profile, no messaging, and never appear in the directory — enforced at the database level, not just hidden in the interface.

Anything urgent, or something the tools above don't cover: email chesslinebookteam@gmail.com and a human will read it.