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What is analysis depth? What does it mean?
What is analysis depth? What does it mean?

Curious about analysis depth? Learn what it means, how it affects your positional analysis, and how to adjust it for deeper insights!

Updated over 2 weeks ago

Analysis depth

After running the Game Review, and while looking at the Analysis tab, you may have noticed a number displaying the 'depth' in the upper right corner.

This number describes how many moves ahead the engine is looking in order to make its decision on what the best move is, what is a blunder, and so on. The higher this number, the more sure you can be about how accurate the engine's decisions are.

An image showing the Analysis panel in a game on Chess.com highlighting the engine depth information

The engine may show a higher depth when analyzing a book move because it has extensive data on opening moves, allowing it to look much further ahead.


How to adjust analysis depth

  1. You can adjust the depth by clicking the gear icon ('Settings') to the right of the depth information.

    An image showing the Analysis panel in a game on Chess.com with an arrow highlighting the Settings icon

  2. This will open the Settings pop-up. Use the drop-down menu next to 'Maximum Time' to set the Analysis depth.

    • If you select 'Unlimited,' the analysis will continue running indefinitely. However, keep in mind that as the engine looks deeper, each additional move takes exponentially longer to calculate.

    An image showing the Settings pop-up window displaying the Maximum time drop-down menu

Game Review and Cloud Analysis run on Chess.com's servers (the 'Cloud'), making the analysis faster and more powerful.

On the other hand, Self-Analysis (manually playing out moves in the Analysis tab, separate from Game Review) runs on your own device, which may result in slower performance.

The key advantage of Cloud Analysis is that it offloads the processing to Chess.com's servers, so it doesn’t rely on your computer’s hardware or software resources.

Cloud Analysis, along with Deep and Maximum engine strength in Game Review, is available only to Diamond members. All members can adjust 'Analysis' settings.

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