Chessmonitor Review
Recently Anish Giri annouced that he partnered with Chessmonitor and he is going to activly update it. After hearing this news, I decided to go back to chessmonitor again and decided to give it a try.
This is a short written blog on what I think about it
About the app
It’s a simple tool where you can create account and connect all lichess and chesscom accounts to it. Then tool analyze your games and provide you a dedicated page and also provide estimated rating.
Overall app idea is nice and focused and created for serious players.
Pricing
I feel pricing is very smart and probably worth it once they introduce more features. Currently there are 2 tiers apart from free tier. Plus costs $5.90 per month if paid yearly and Professional costs $44.90 monthly if paid yearly.
On the same hand chesscom diamond membership costs 316 INR monthly if paid yearly for diamond membership (around $3.60)
For beginner and intermidiate players, chesscom is clearly preferable choice as they have game reviews and other ton of features.
For advanced players and coaches, purchasing this looks a good deal during the tournaments.
My suggestions
I think they want to keep this app for top chess players and coaches. The better it to increase pricing a lot (Something like chessmood did). Maybe $49 for plus and $129 for professional.
Now to justify the pricing, I got few ideas:
Provide study plan made by Anish giri to climb from 2000 to GM and actual IM or GM to crosscheck if player doing the study or not, etc.
They can introduce highly tuned AI which will help analysing all the games of the opponent and then provide exact game style. This will help players to prepare easily.
Adding some advance level chess courses with key plans and ideas.
Game review feature for advanced players.
It will be great if they can build AI which will find opening novelties from recent OTB top level games.
Make it offline version where players can download the software (Like chessbase)
Overall I feel, current pricing is worth only if you are going to play any tournament and purchase it for a month.