About Mikhail.Live

What Mikhail is

Mikhail is a chess coach built around one rule: say only what can be counted. He reads the games you actually played, checks every move against a chess engine, and keeps a record of the mistakes that cost you something real. Everything he later tells you about your play traces back to moves in that record.

He is not a play server and not a chat window. He is the part of improving that most players skip - looking honestly at what already happened, and then drilling exactly that.

How the coaching loop works

Review. Import your recent games from Chess.com or Lichess, or paste a PGN from anywhere. Each move gets an engine pass; the review names the opening you actually played, the moment the game turned, and what the position was asking for at that moment.

Measure. Every real error becomes a counted event tied to the game and the move it came from. The Coach Report ranks those counts. When something is not measured well enough to rank, the report says so in those words instead of dressing it up as a diagnosis, and when there is nothing recorded at all, Mikhail says nothing.

Train. Training is mostly rated tactics chosen for your level by the trainer, with positions you misplayed yourself mixed in - at most one drill in ten, a cap the server enforces over every ten positions it serves, because your own mistakes are scarce and worth spreading out. Mastery only rises on a clean, unassisted solve. Revealing an answer is recorded and never rewarded, so the number cannot be gamed into looking better than your play.

Study the openings. The opening database carries 3,812 named lines across 149 families, each with per-move notes and the plan the line is trying to carry out. Your review links straight to the point where your game left the book. You can browse the whole database without an account - every family and every named line has a public page with its name, its moves, its plan summary and the first 4 per-move notes. The remaining notes, and training a line on a board, need a free account.

Watch the numbers. Statistics report measured change only. A number without enough behind it says "not enough data yet" instead of drawing a flattering trend.

What it is, and what it is not

Both columns matter. The second one is the reason to trust the first.

Your data

• Games are stored only with your consent. A PGN you paste in for a single review is analysed and not kept. Imported game history is written to disk only after you turn on game storage, and turning it back off in Settings stops it.
• Your birthday is used for two things. Confirming you are at least 13 when you sign up, and resetting your own password if you forget it. It is never shown on your profile and never used for anything else.
• Usage analytics are tied to your account. A page view records the path, a coarse device class (phone or desktop) and the time, and while you are signed in it is stored with your account, along with a day-by-day count of how long that account spends on each part of the site. The site owner can read those per-account totals. No IP address, no user-agent string and no query string is stored.
• Your password is stored as a hash, never as text, and changing or resetting it signs your other devices out.

Contact

Something looks wrong, or this page did not answer your question? Write to [email protected], or use the form below, and say what you were doing when it happened — that is the part that makes it fixable.