How reliance on the eval bar ruined my calculation, and how I’m trying to fix it with Botvinnik’s me

For a long time, I had a bad habit: looking at the engine eval bar instead of calculating. Whenever I analyzed positions, having Stockfish on felt like a shortcut. But over a real wooden board, the reality hit hard. Without the glowing bar, my board vision vanished. I froze in quiet positions, missed simple tactics, and plateaued around 1100.
Engines show +3.5 or -2.0, but cold numbers don't teach pattern retention. That led me to how Mikhail Botvinnik studied: keeping structured notebooks of his own calculation failures and recurring blind spots.
To bridge my physical games with structured training, I built an open web tool called ChessGG (chessgg.pro).
You take a photo of a physical board, and computer vision digitizes it into FEN in two seconds. Instead of dumping engine lines, it isolates your blunder into a vault and uses Leitner spaced repetition (1, 3, and 7 days later) until the pattern becomes instinct.
It is completely free, runs in the mobile browser. I'd love your feedback on the board vision accuracy and training loop!

@egozor said ^

For a long time, I had a bad habit: looking at the engine eval bar instead of calculating. Whenever I analyzed positions, having Stockfish on felt like a shortcut. But over a real wooden board, the reality hit hard. Without the glowing bar, my board vision vanished. I froze in quiet positions, missed simple tactics, and plateaued around 1100.
Engines show +3.5 or -2.0, but cold numbers don't teach...

Practice puzzles (those dont have the eval bar), maybe change to zen mode so you dont get distracted from all the fancy buttons on lichess. Also, you can use the eval bar effectively, like turning it off in a position, thinking for a bit by yourself and then reopening it to see what you can improve in. I dont think im much help but gl anyway!

Thanks a lot for the tips!
Zen mode is definitely underrated, and manually hiding the eval is what my coach always suggested. My biggest struggle was just pure discipline—the moment I got stuck calculating for more than 45 seconds, my monkey brain would sneak a peek anyway haha.
Also, my main issue was over-the-board (physical pieces at the local club), where there are no screens or Zen modes at all—just pure calculation blindness.
That’s actually why I wanted to automate the Botvinnik notebook thing with the camera scanner: force myself to record the physical mistake without seeing the answer, and then let spaced repetition test me on it days later without the temptation to peek.
Do you usually track recurring blunder patterns yourself, or do you just grind regular puzzle rushes?

You could find some puzzles and if you have a chessboard at home, you can place the pieces like in the puzzle and play it like an otb game. As for me, i like to look at my mistakes, and see what i can learn from it, before doing a bunch of puzzles on it (my account has close to nothing activity - i have another one, this ones for analysing games etc). I also recommend studying books of really good players and playing their games out on a chess board so it’s not on a screen and try and see what ideas you come up with. I’m not the best at this so you should probably ask your coach for help!

The hardest part of calculation is knowing WHAT and WHEN to calculate.

It has been said, by somebody with a much higher rating than Noflaps, that grandmasters calculate less than class players -- it's just that they calculate the right things.

One helpful practice for me is simply to run the Lichess game evaluation feature after I play a game, and let IT tell me where I blundered. I can then concentrate on the spot where there was a missed opportunity -- and not just FIND that opportunity but also NOTICE the characteristics of a position with opportunity.

It seems to work, since my puzzle rating has, at times, been over 2400 -- and is currently above 2300.

It certainly wasn't that high when I first came to Lichess.

Lichess is like a fresh spring for aspiring players, when its helpful features are actually used.

Admittedly, it took me a bit before I even knew there WAS a game evaluation feature here, or how to start it. But it's great.

That’s such spot-on advice, and honestly, you described my exact ideal workflow!
Studying personal mistakes before jumping into random tactical puzzles makes a massive difference—coaches like Dvoretsky and Yusupov always emphasized that fixing your own recurring blind spots yields 10x more rating gain than grinding generic puzzle rush.
Setting up book positions on a real wooden board is the gold standard for calculation, but my biggest friction was always transferring a complex position back into an engine when I got genuinely stuck and needed a quick sanity check. Manually clicking 28 pieces onto an analysis board on a laptop completely killed my study momentum.
That friction is actually what pushed me to build the camera scanner for ChessGG—being able to just point the phone at the wooden board, digitize it to FEN in 2 seconds, and save the position to review later without breaking the "offline" feel of the study session.
If you happen to analyze on your board this week, I’d be super curious to see if the scanner recognizes your physical set! Thanks again for sharing your routine, really appreciate the insight.

@Noflaps said ^

The hardest part of calculation is knowing WHAT and WHEN to calculate.

It has been said, by somebody with a much higher rating than Noflaps, that grandmasters calculate less than class players -- it's just that they calculate the right things.

One helpful practice for me is simply to run the Lichess game evaluation feature after I play a game, and let IT tell me where I blundered. I can then c...

That quote hits the nail on the head. I believe it was Kotov (or John Nunn) who pointed out that strong players don't brute-force calculate every branch—their intuition filters out 95% of candidate moves instantly because their brain recognizes the tactical triggers.
The Lichess "Learn from your mistakes" tool is brilliant for identifying those moments right after a game. My personal wall with it was the forgetting curve: I’d find the right move immediately after the game, feel satisfied, and then walk into the exact same tactical motif a week later because my brain hadn't truly integrated the pattern into muscle memory.
That’s precisely why I got obsessed with the spaced repetition side of things (and adding the camera scanner so I could do this with my offline club games too).
Do you find that reviewing a game once right after playing is enough for the pattern to stick in your live games, or do you have a personal system for revisiting recurring themes?

At the moment, I don't have a retrieval system to used spaced repetition. I just try to build my ability to helpfully generalize.

In the OLD days, I used to HAND STAMP (no kidding) a small chess board onto an index card, using a stamp and an ink pad, and then (by hand, using symbols for the pieces that I learned from a helpful book) write in the position I wanted to study. And then I'd use the flash cards thus made to provide spaced repetition.

I also tend to play over games played by the prodigiously gifted, and play them over and over and over until I have them memorized -- exploring alternatives and seeing why they weren't played, or why they perhaps should have been. I often do that using Cecil Purdy's "guess the move" idea (at least I THINK Cecil first came up with that idea -- but who knows).

REALLY focusing on a single game -- for hours -- seems to help. I've gotten quite a bit better over the years, and seem to keep getting better even as I age -- which is a bit weird. But perhaps that's possible because I'm NOT performing in the stratosphere.

Or perhaps I'm just kidding myself. After all, if I actually LOST a step, would I know? I rarely play rated anymore, after all. (Unlike years ago, when rating seemed really important). Now each chess game just seems like a pleasant and interesting walk through a new forest. Even when I lose.

Learning to lose without upset or loss of confidence takes practice, too! I've had plenty of practice!

@Noflaps said ^

At the moment, I don't have a retrieval system to used spaced repetition. I just try to build my ability to helpfully generalize.

In the OLD days, I used to HAND STAMP (no kidding) a small chess board onto an index card, using a stamp and an ink pad, and then (by hand, using symbols for the pieces that I learned from a helpful book) write in the position I wanted to study. And then I'd use th...

The image of you hand-stamping an 8x8 grid onto index cards with an ink pad and drawing the pieces by hand is absolutely legendary. That level of dedication is incredible!
Thank you for sharing that story—it honestly made my day and gave me a lot of perspective on why we study this game in the first place.

Shadow Master is live. The full Capablanca–Tartakower (1924) game is fully seeded and playable move-by-move. The interactive board, 4-tier evaluation, and XP rewards are all working.