Press kit.

In one sentence

Notation is a chess coaching app for iPhone, iPad and Mac that watches every game you play and explains, in plain English, what you could have done differently.

In one paragraph

Notation is the first chess app to encode multiple grandmaster-level coaching frameworks — Heisman, Silman, Aagaard — into deterministic on-device analysis, then use a language model solely to articulate what the analysis found. Unlike conventional AI chess products that ask a language model to reason about positions, Notation's coaching substrate computes every chess judgment before the LLM sees the position. The result is coaching that teaches chess pedagogy rather than narrating engine output. The app also includes Shadow, a unique opponent that learns your style and saves checkpoints so you can play yourself from a year ago. Notation runs on iPhone, iPad and Mac, pairs with Chessnut electronic boards, and supports multiple LLM providers on a bring-your-own-key basis.

Key facts

Name

Notation: Chess Coach

Platforms

iPhone, iPad, Mac

Price

£6.99 (currently £2.99 launch price, one-off, no subscription)

Developer

Solo independent developer

Engines

Stockfish 18, Fairy-Stockfish, Maia (all on-device)

Coaching

Heisman (7 positional elements), Silman (15 emphasis frames), Aagaard (positional predicate library)

Baselines

21+ super-GM cohort (Carlsen, Nakamura, Fischer, Tal, Capablanca, and others)

Hardware

Chessnut Air, Pro, Go, Air+, Move

Website

notationchesscoach.app

What makes it different

• The chess is never generated — it's explained. Every evaluation comes from Stockfish 18. Every pattern, weakness, and tactical motif is detected by fifteen hand-tuned on-device classifiers built on decades of coaching theory. The language model's only job is the final step: putting rigorous analysis into plain English. That's why Notation doesn't hallucinate chess advice — the coaching layer and the language layer are completely separate.
• Pattern detection across games. Notation finds the recurring mistakes in your play, not just one-off blunders in a single game.
• Shadow. An opponent that learns how you play and saves checkpoints — so you can spar with the version of you from last year.
• Real boards. Pair with a Chessnut electronic board and play on real wood while Nadia coaches.
• Privacy by design. Engines and core coaching run on-device. Optional cloud AI features are bring-your-own-key — the user's data, on the user's account, never proxied through us.

Assets

A press kit with logos, screenshots, and key art is available on request — email hello@notationchesscoach.app and you'll get a Dropbox link the same day.