A free AI chess coach, and why it stays free

Walnut Chess is a guided AI chess coach, and it is free. Not free for a week, not free with the good parts locked, not free until the launch is over. Free, for every player, for good.

Because "free" is a word that gets stretched, here is exactly what we mean by it.

What free means here

No subscription. There is no monthly or yearly plan, and nothing that turns into one after a trial.
No premium tier. Every feature is open to every player: the coach, guided play, game reviews, the 3,800+ openings, famous games, endgames, puzzles, drills and flashcards. There is no "Pro" version with the real coaching in it.
No card. You sign up with Google, or with an email, a password and a name. We never ask for payment details.
Always. This isn't a launch offer. It stays free.

Why a coach should be free

Look at how most strong players got strong and you'll usually find a teacher: a club mentor, a parent who played, a coach someone paid for every week. Research on chess expertise backs this up. Serious, guided study predicts skill better than simply playing more games.

That kind of guidance has always been rationed by money. Regular lessons with a titled coach cost more than most people will ever spend on a hobby, so most players never have one. They play, they lose, they look at an engine arrow they don't understand, and they plateau.

An AI coach grounded in a real engine changes the cost of good guidance. It can't do everything a great human teacher does (we're honest about that in AI coach or human coach?), but it can give every player a plan, feedback during games, reviews that say why, and practice at the right level. If that's possible, it seems wrong to rebuild the old filter by putting it behind a paywall.

What keeps it running

We'd rather say this plainly than leave you guessing:

Stockfish is free and open source, and runs on our own server. The engine behind every grade and every opponent costs us nothing per move.
The opening data comes from Lichess's open dataset, released under CC0.
The coach's words are the one real running cost. They come from Claude, Anthropic's AI model, and each reply costs a little. So there's a fair daily limit on coach replies per player, set high enough that normal study rarely comes near it. The board, the engine, the library and the drills have no limit at all.

Free doesn't mean second-rate

The design choices that make Walnut Chess a good coach are the same whether or not anyone pays:

The engine decides what's good, and the coach explains it, so it's right about the chess. See what is an AI chess coach?
It starts with a conversation about your chess and builds a plan from it.
Think first is on by default, so the coach helps you find moves rather than copy them. See guided play without autopilot.
Reviews stop at the moments that mattered, and you can argue with every explanation.

Getting started

Sign up, and you go straight into a short chat with your coach, which turns into your plan. Our first-week guide walks you through the days after that.

And if you want to build a whole improvement routine without spending anything, we put together how to get better at chess for free, with the best free resources beyond Walnut Chess too.