Dating for people who think three moves ahead

Your repertoire is a personality test. The Caro-Kann player and the Englund Gambit enjoyer are not the same person, and the algorithm knows it.

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How it works for chess players

Connect via Lichess or Chess.com. We read openings, variants, time controls and puzzle themes, never your rating as a measure of worth. Only derived signals are stored. All opt-in, all revocable.

A game has a time control, an opening (classified by ECO code, A00 to E99), a variant, and a result
Matching happens at every level: shared openings, shared variants, shared pace of play
Games per week and puzzle streaks provide engagement data
Rating is used only to suggest people you would enjoy playing, never to rank who you are shown. We have strong opinions on Elo in dating

Niche overlap > mainstream overlap

Both playing five-minute blitz? So do millions of people every day: Lichess alone hosts more than five million games a day. Both being deep into Atomic, where captures explode the board? That is a shared obsession.

Mainstream

Standard blitz, Italian Game

Popularity 85 → NicheWeight 0.15

Niche

Atomic chess

Popularity 6 → NicheWeight 0.94

Scale check: the Lichess open database logged about 292,000 rated Atomic games in September 2026, against millions of standard games every day. Popularity figures above are illustrative; real weights come from rarity across Affinity Atlas users.

What gets scored

Shared openings weighted by how rarely each ECO family appears across players. Two Scandinavian devotees outrank two people who both open e4

Shared variants - Chess960, Crazyhouse, Atomic, Antichess, Horde, Racing Kings and more. Variant overlap is one of the strongest niche signals in chess

Time control fit - bullet, blitz, rapid, classical or correspondence. Pace of play says a lot about temperament

Puzzle themes - forks, sacrifices, endgames. Lichess tags every puzzle, so taste in tactics is measurable

Engagement depth - games per week and streaks, log-normalised so a 50-games-a-day addict does not dominate

Over the board - club nights, congresses and cafe chess via Interest Q&A. Shared hunting grounds count

Example match

"You share 3 opening families avg NicheWeight 0.71. Both play the Caro-Kann (B12) as Black. Variant overlap: Chess960 and Atomic. Both prefer 10+5 rapid over bullet. Puzzle themes in common: endgame, zugzwang. Neither of you has played a bullet game this year."

Not "you both play chess." The actual openings. The actual variants. The actual pace.

Integrations

Lichess

Live link · games, openings, variants, puzzles

Chess.com

Live link · games, clubs, time controls

Interest Q&A

OTB clubs, favourite players, study habits

All opt-in. All revocable. We show signals, never raw data. Ratings are never used to rank you. Live links use an official API you authorise; file imports use the data export the service gives you; partner access needs the service's agreement; anything else you add by hand.

Keep reading: The Elo Score Problem · How Niche Weighting Actually Works

Affinity Atlas is in development

No real matching is live yet. If you want someone who will happily analyse your blunders over coffee - get in touch.

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