RV Chess

RV Chess exists to remove one paywall: Chess.com's Game Review, which free accounts get once a day and Diamond members get without limit. It runs Stockfish 18 as WebAssembly in the browser and produces the same kind of report - move classifications from brilliant to blunder, an evaluation graph, accuracy, and an estimated performance rating for each side - for any game, as many times a day as a player wants. The import path is the clever part. A Chess.com or Lichess game URL works as-is, a username pulls the last twenty games, and on Chess.com the fastest route is simply editing the address bar so that chess.com reads rvchess.com. On Android the share sheet does the same job, and a free browser extension adds a button on the game page.

Because the engine runs on the device and nothing is uploaded, there is no account, no ad, and no data trail, which is a rarer combination than it sounds for a free chess tool. The classification thresholds are published, so the labels are at least explainable, though they are RV Chess's own and a game will not score identically here and on Chess.com. The extras (Guess the Elo, a sandbox board, play against Stockfish with custom rules) are pleasant but incidental.

The limits follow from the design. Engine depth is whatever the device can afford in a browser tab, so a phone review is shallower than a desktop one and both are shallower than a cloud engine. And it stops at diagnosis: there are no puzzles built from the mistakes, no repetition queue, no training loop, so a player who wants to actually fix the recurring blunder still needs a separate tool. It is also a solo project with no visible revenue model, which makes its longevity a fair question. As a free replacement for the daily Game Review it is hard to fault; as a training app it is not trying to be one.