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What is the Game Explorer?
What is the Game Explorer?
Updated over 7 months ago

The Chess.com Game Explorer is an incredible tool for examining the most popular opening moves among top Grandmasters. With the Game Explorer, you can search through millions of games played by top players and see the most popular openings and moves. Then study the games to see the themes and ideas played by Grandmasters in similar games!

Getting Started

To use the Game Explorer, click on the Explorer icon above the moves list of your game record, or ongoing Daily game. This will take you to the explorer for all games with this sequence of moves.

View the Most Popular Moves in Every Position

For each position in the opening, you can see the full range of viable moves to make next - and see the cumulative results from thousands of high-rated games in a simple table.

This shows the range of possible next moves, the number of games that next move happened in, and the win percentages for white and black. Click on the move you want to see, and the chart will update to show the choices for the move after that.

The opening database contains nearly 3 million games, all played by masters! You can be sure that each line you are looking at was played by a high level player. This database is updated regularly, with current games being added each week.

You can also explore the games that YOU play on Chess.com to see your strengths and weaknesses in how you play in the opening. Click the dropdown where it says “Master Games” and you can select your games, or games of everyone on chess.com (not just grandmaster games)

Currently, the Explorer does not index Variant games, computer games, or games that are fewer than 15 ply, or timeout games that are fewer than 29 ply. (a 'Ply' is one player's move, so in this example 15 'ply' would be White's move 8)

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