We have a new PGN viewer, called the <Olga Chess Viewer>. It's intended to be a happy medium of the best features of Chess Viewer Deluxe and pgn4web.

The official beta test has begun: if you want to be a beta-tester, just use the new viewer choice in the viewer options for <Olga Viewer (beta)>. (You can change your viewer to Olga either from your Preferences Page or by the pulldown menu on any game page.)

Among Olga's many features are:

• Quick loading, lightweight, and mobile-friendly.
• Smooth, pleasant piece movements.
• The ability to manipulate the pieces via drag-and-drop any time; a feature we call "Analysis mode."
• A very nice chess font, which may be configurable in the future.
• The ability to use the arrow keys to move and backward through the game, or to toggle autoplay mode.
• The ability to copy the FEN of the given position to your clipboard.
• A very nice and easy-to-read display of annotations.
• The ability to have rank and file labels (a-h/1-8), or to turn them off permanently, depending on your preference.
• Olga is interfaced with our dedicated Stockfish server, so that you can request a quick 6-second analysis for the current position. (This ability will soon be greatly expanded for premium members.)

We hope that this product is good enough to one day become the default Chessgames viewer.

You probably won't need it, but we've prepared an Olga Chess Viewer Quickstart to spell out exactly how it works.

We don't expect it to be bug-free at the moment (hence the beta test) — but we've already ran it through the wringer with odds games, underpromotions, zero-move games, ridiculously long games, games requiring "exotic" disambiguation (e.g. Q7f3) .... and so far, she's performed like a champ! We're especially keen to ensure that it works on 100% of our database, so if you find a game that Olga can't cope with, please let us know.

But it's great to finally have Olga up.

<We're especially keen to ensure that it works on 100% of our database, so if you find a game that Olga can't cope with, please let us know.>

Olga can't cope with some of the Fischerandom games, like Team White vs Team Black, 2009 and Leko vs Adams, 2001 - though the latter has bad PGN, so in that specific case it's not really Olga's fault.

I like the PGN/move display of CVD and CVD-II, right hand side, with moves in columns, like a score sheet. The display where moves are all at the bottom of the board, ugh!!

The auto move is nice, but the usage of "=" for pause/stop is a bit confusing, and no solid arrow for start of auto move.

I don't have an exact figure, but I think the number of games where all captures are omitted is somewhere between 500 and 1000, unless it's changed dramatically lately. (There might be additional games beyond that where captures are generally indicated but a single capture is accidentally omitted somewhere.)

<Anyway, that's why I mentioned it here> Yeah, I get it. <a robust Olga capable of coping with minor PGN flaws would of course also be good.> It actually is pretty robust when it comes to "bad" PGN; I am a little surprised the lack of "x" confounds it. In fact, it may be that some software I wrote to interface with Olga is what's actually on the Fritz, and not Olga proper.

♔

On a totally unrelated note, I am a little amazed at the results of an 8 hour analysis of this critical position in the Yugoslav Attack:

click for larger view

Common chess sense tells us that Bc4 and O-O-O are the most logical continuations, but Stockfish (and now the Opening Explorer) says "Tally ho!" and puts g4 well in the lead, with the "logical" moves in 2nd and 3rd place.