Analyzing a Healthy Addiction to Chess

Hi! Can you tell us who you are and what you do?

Hello everyone. I’m David Ngo, the creator of chesshub.com—a chess platform made to help you become a better player. I primarily work as a software engineer specializing in Microservices, web applications, REST software architecture and Agile software development, and right now I work at Amazon!

Chesshub.com is made with a powerful chess analysis engine, you can use it to practice different scenarios and make the best possible moves based on your and the opponent’s positioning. Try it out yourself and recreate your most challenging situations and learn the best way to win!

What game do you like to play?

Of course, my favorite game is chess. I play it every morning. I like the strategy and the depth that it offers. It's a game that requires a lot of focus and that makes me feel like I'm present in the moment while I'm playing it. You can also constantly learn and get better at it, and I like that there's no luck involved. It's easy to go back and see what you did so you can learn from mistakes in the past.

One of the things that I enjoyed the most is that there are two players that are looking at the board, but the winner is the person who sees something the other person doesn't. So to me, that's a constant reminder of how perspective and insight can make all the difference. In addition to chess, I have a Nintendo Switch. So I've been going through all the classic games that I liked as a kid. And I also really love RPGs and RTS games.

How did you end up loving chess?

I remember seeing chess for the very first time on a computer that my uncle had. I was immediately drawn to it just because of the way that the pieces looked and by the concept of two armies facing off against each other. So after that, I quickly learned how to play. I think I was around seven at the time.

Over the years, I played on and off, but it's an addiction that I always keep coming back to. There have been times when I've gotten frustrated and had to uninstall the app or stop playing for a while just because I felt that I had plateaued or stagnated and it wasn't getting any better. But it's something that I keep coming back to.

A healthy addiction to chess

There are various openings that I like to play, but I don't like the other variations of the game itself. I don't really play chess960 or any of the others. I just like the classic variation. Though I do play timed blitz chess, and the games that I typically play are five minutes on each side, and the clock is not incremented.

It's an addiction, really. At times it's made me really happy, and other times it's made me quite frustrated. But when I feel like I'm improving, I'm having a good time with it.

Dealing with chess toxicity

It’s actually a lot more common to encounter toxic chess players now, I've experienced that too. Most of the time people will say nothing, but when they do say something, it's usually mocking you for making a bad move or laughing at you. I've experienced a lot of weird cases where I was winning a game and all of a sudden the person took 30 seconds to make a move in the five-minute game, which is a lot of time. So it felt like they were cheating and they all of a sudden came back with a brilliant move and then won the game and then started mocking me after that. 

That happens a lot, and I don't think it's specific to chess. I bet if you played other games where the crowd was much younger, like Fortnite or League of Legends, you would get communication that is a lot worse. I think it's just the aspect of being online and being anonymous in general, it’s not like anyone can punch you through a screen, after all.

Can you tell us more about the creation of chesshub.com?

Yeah, I remember the domain. I started out using chess-hub.com, as the domain chesshub.com itself was taken at the time. I chose the name because I wanted to give myself room to grow. I wanted to be something that was more generic and generally applies to anything about chess.

In the beginning, I was building an MVP and a tool that was very specific to just analysis. But it was always in the back of my mind that I wanted to do more than that. So I bought the current domain around five months after I launched. I remember it was when I got to about a thousand users. I was closely monitoring the site and the user count as it was growing and then I was reading the feedback. Some of the feedback was encouraging. Most of it was complaints about how something didn't work or the moves recommended weren't always the most powerful. But some of it was constructive, like pointing out bugs, suggesting improvements or just saying thanks for creating the site.

And it was through that kind of feedback that I realized people were finding value in what I had built. And so when that happened, I decided to buy the domain. I reached out to the owner, the guy was erratic, he wanted a lot of money and was trying to tell me that the website, the domain itself, was worth millions of dollars.

Domain haggling

This was around 2015, and he kept trying to tell me that was worth millions of dollars and sending me articles that I knew weren't real. But eventually, we settled on something. In the beginning, he wanted around 40k for it, then immediately dropped to half of that and it was out of my budget. So I didn't reply to him for a couple of weeks.

And then he would come back to me, I would reply. And then we went back and forth that way with me just playing cool and pretending like I wasn't that interested until we eventually settled for a little over a grand, which I felt was a great deal at the time. And I feel like it's worth a multiple of that today.

I also bought another domain, chesshub.org, and it was significantly cheaper. And I've had other domains usually with a dash or something in them. Nothing significant, but I feel like the asking price also changes based on the perceived success of your company. If you're a successful startup, whoever owns the domain is going to ask for a lot more money.

Motivation behind creating chesshub.com

So the reason why I created chess was because I wanted to get better at it. I was playing a lot of games and I wanted to be able to analyze them and learn from my mistakes. At the time, I looked for online tools, but what I wanted wasn't available. So I felt like the existing options were clunky. They didn't allow for storing or navigating back to previous board positions, and the calculations took too long. 

When I'm analyzing a game, I like to possibly navigate to a key point in the game and then figure out what the best moves from there would have been. Maybe there was something I didn't see, or did I make a mistake at that point and then possibly play a few moves down the sequence of that line. And I like to do that for several points in the game anywhere where I feel like it was a key point and the tools didn't allow for that. 

So I decided to build one myself. I wanted to make a tool that addressed all the shortcomings that I saw on the other websites that were doing chess analysis. And it really started out as a challenge to test my creative and technical abilities. But when I saw that when I launched and that people were using it, that really motivated me to keep on improving it.

So what Chesshub does is it makes it easier and faster to review games. Users can edit a board and add up to a thousand different positions and then navigate to any of those positions and get the best move calculations for any of them. They can quickly go back and forth and edit the board. And I try to return a move in at most three seconds for positions that Chesshub has seen before. We return those immediately. And so it's snappier and faster. 

I also don't require a login for the site because I feel like a lot of people just want to quickly set up a board and calculate. I do have users who create accounts and log in, but I would say around four to five times as many people use a site without ever logging in. And right now the main feature of the site is the analysis of chess positions. But ultimately, my goal is to expand it to become a learning tool for anyone interested in becoming a better chess player.

Can you tell us more about your monetization scheme?

I get around 30,000 users a month. At any time, there are probably 20 to 30 people on the site concurrently. I monetize using Google Ads and I would say that I don't do it effectively enough because if I look at the .txt file of my ads, it's just a single line. Whereas when I look at other websites that are monetizing using ads, it's like pages and pages of stuff. So I feel like my knowledge is a bit lacking in that area.

It's also not something that I put time into. My time is limited, so I mainly want to spend it building out the features of the site. Working in advertising at Amazon, I see that the ads running there are mostly specific to products that are being sold on the site. But I can say that the insight I have is that we're seeing more and more that people are just too lazy to create their own ads. They feel like it's a lot of work. And so the platforms are just asking users to upload the content. They’re like, “Give us all your images and all the keywords that you want to optimize for, and then we'll use AI to generate the ads, even video ads!”

Working at Amazon

Along with generating the ads at Amazon, the AI is able to constantly tweak the ads and make recommendations for what it feels like might be the most efficient ad. That's done by tweaking the visuals and the text in the ad. So we can use it for testing out different product descriptions, colors, fonts and even shortening the text. 

And then all of those recommendations are A-B tested and we collect the data, then feed that result back into the model, which then further refines and tweaks its suggestions. And that creates a continuous feedback loop that allows the AI to constantly make better recommendations over time. It's less work for an advertiser and removes the guesswork as to how they should tweak the look and feel of the ad.

Convenience of making ads now

I would say that ads are a lot easier to create now than they've ever been in the past. As for whether they're actually worse or better, I’d say they're more engaging now as they draw more clicks. But I remember in the very early days of the internet you had things like flashing stuff,  text scrolling back and forth and horizontally and blinking in and out. So I would say that we're better than that.

Is chesshub.com your only game?

I did experiment with creating Facebook games and turn-based strategy games earlier in my career. If I could go back over and start over, I think I would have just jumped straight into chess because it's always been there right in front of me. The earlier games that I built didn't really stand the test of time. I spent a lot of time building them and then almost nobody played them. So they don't exist to this day.

Whereas chesshub was built 10 years ago and people keep coming back to the site and I still have people who created accounts from about five years ago that regularly visit the site.

Chesshub.com community

I don't maintain a community. I have a feedback form on my site where anybody can enter stuff they want into a text box and submit it. And occasionally if the feedback has been really helpful, I've reached out to the person just by emailing them. But I don't have a community at the moment.

Do you remember the time you first hit 1000 users?

It was about five months after I launched. I remember just being on the website all the time and watching the user count grow. I was closely monitoring it and I was getting say 5 to 10 new users every day. And after about 5 months it hit 1000.

I remember reading through feedback, which was pretty encouraging and constructive, though some of it was just complaining. But I think honestly if Chesshub didn't hit the thousand-user milestone, I probably wouldn't be running it today. That motivated me to keep on improving the site, and after I hit a thousand that's when I decided to purchase the domain.

Growing the number of users

So for Chesshub, it's all organic search. I haven't done any advertising and I mostly just lean into building features that I think will be useful to people and just hoping that it grows through word of mouth.

Has anyone tried to buy chesshub.com from you?

I get requests and inquiries about purchasing the domain all the time, probably every few months. But I haven't been interested in selling the domain. This is kind of my pet project that I intend to keep for a long time and keep building on just to see how far I can take it.

Do you have any ongoing or future plans for the site?

So at the moment, I'm developing a feature that lets users import their games or even collections of their games. And then I plan to analyze those games and identify mistakes and areas for improvement. Using that data, Chesshub will eventually be able to create personalized lessons and targeted puzzles for players to enhance their game. 

In my experience, learning chess is always in the context of a single game. For someone who's trying to get better, they may make the same mistakes over and over again without knowing it. And so if I had a lot of their games, I'd be able to tell them, you keep doing this over and over again. I could even drill them on their mistakes and just constantly pound them with those scenarios, and maybe quiz them on this or that position to see if they make the right move and get it to the point where they're no longer making those mistakes.

I feel like that's how people learn, through nudging and repetition. So if we can continue to help them know where they're making those mistakes, they can improve in those areas. But most people just play games and then they move on to another one without looking at what they did before. And so having a way to analyze those games more easily would help many people improve.

I'm also updating the puzzles to accurately match someone's skill. So right now you just get a random puzzle every time. But I want to make it so it matches someone's elo rating and eventually also be able to match based on mistakes from games that they played in the past. And I'm always adding more puzzles, I curate them myself in the mornings.

I'm also looking to make the openings on the site searchable. Right now it's just one big list that you kind of have to scroll through, and it's hard to find anything because there are thousands of openings. I can make that more useful with just a text box with a search function.

And eventually, I'd like to add multiplayer, but that's going to be a lot of work, so I need to have a large block of time in which I could do it. It's also a pretty intimidating feature because it opens up a whole can of worms.

Do you plan on making more games?

I think that the scope of it and what it can grow to is more than enough work than I have time for. And I think it's something that there's no end to the number of features and improvements I could make. So at the moment I just plan to work on that, I have thought from time to time about making other games, as I see people making crossword-like games and those are all very interesting to me, but I really have to prioritize what I put my time into.

Can you give advice to people who want to try and follow in your footsteps?

There are a few I’d like to say, definitely!

1. Prototype and just get it out there

Figure out something that you can prototype in a few weeks and just build it, release it without overthinking and don't spend too much time perfecting it. Don't worry if you're embarrassed by the first initial release of it. Just get it out there.

2. Create a feedback loop and start a website

Build and release something that's an MVP so that you can test if people actually want to use your product and then start collecting feedback. I think it's most important to build a quick feedback loop early on. And if you can start with the website because it allows for quick iteration, you can push out new releases.

When I'm working on Chesshub, I try to make it a point to push out a release every day, even if it's something small like updating some text. But that just gets you into the habit and builds that process of I can iteratively improve on this thing every time I work on it.

Also with the website, you don't have to rely on third-party approvals like with the App Store and the Google Play Store. So if you start the website, everyone has a browser and can easily access it and I feel that that makes them ideal for an ideal starting point over building a mobile or a desktop app. And it also helps if it's something that you can personally relate to.

3. Build for something you actually care about

I built a lot of B2B software over my career and I often felt disconnected from the users because it wasn't software that I was using or I would want to use. So if you're working on something that you care about and you understand, it's easier to stay motivated and you'll have a better sense of what the users need. It should be something that you can relate to because that passion will help drive development and it will be a more rewarding experience for you.

Where can we find you to learn more about you and your projects?

You can email me at david@chesshub.com. You can also go to the site and there's a feedback form where they can submit feedback. I read all the feedback that comes through and I'm grateful for all of it, even if it's just something that tells me that, “Hey, this is broken, it doesn't work!”