The chess library, not the chess arcade.
Caissly is an encyclopedic publication about the game of chess. It is built around the same idea that animated Chess Informant, Šahovski Informator, and the great mid-century opening manuals: that the game deserves a record kept with care.
What's here
Every Encyclopedia of Chess Openings classification, A00 to E99 — currently 3,161 distinct positions. Each page is interactive, with a playable board, the canonical move order, parent and child variations, and master-game statistics drawn from the Lichess Masters Database.
For the most-studied openings — currently 51 lines, growing — there is a long-form editorial article: the history of the line, its main strategic ideas, the games that shaped its reputation, and a study guide. We write these the way a magazine editor would: in full sentences, with judgment, and without filler.
Tournaments cover the present-day calendar with editorial overlays and links to the canonical sources (FIDE, The Week in Chess, ChessBase, regional federations).
How it's made
The site is built statically and served from Cloudflare. There is no
backend, no advertising, no user tracking. The opening database comes
from the open Lichess chess-openings dataset. Editorial
articles are drafted with the assistance of large language models and
reviewed by humans against the same rule used by serious chess editors
for the last century: do not publish a quote you cannot verify.
Who it's for
Caissly is for readers who already love the game and want a place to read about it that isn't optimised for engagement. There are no streaks, no notifications, no "openings you should learn this week." There are only the openings, the games, the players, and the long argument those three have been having since the sixteenth century.
What's missing
This is v1. Players, games annotations, a glossary of terms, and translations into Russian and Portuguese are planned for later releases. Until they exist, the navigation does not pretend they do.
Contact
Corrections, suggestions, or errors of fact — editors@caissly.com.
— The editors, May 2026