BrilliantBoard
A weekend tournament companion for amateur chess players: scan your OTB scoresheet, get a clean PGN, an AI post-mortem, and a shareable annotated PDF for your coach or clubmates.
weekend tournament players who play 3-5 classical events a year
- Scoreheet photo-to-PGN via OCR (no typing moves at 11pm)
- Auto-classification of each game: opening surprise, time-trouble collapse, tactical miss
- Shareable annotated PDF styled like ChessBase Magazine
- Personal rating-progression tracker across events
Tournament activity is surging with Grand Masters events back in the news; amateur OTB players still hand-score games because Lichess/Chess.com don't capture real-life play; mobile OCR and LLM annotation make capture and analysis one-tap.
Real but narrow demand: at least 5 shipping apps (ScanChess, ChessCopilot, XChess.AI, Chess Scanner, ChessSnap) target this exact use case, confirming weekend OTB players want scoresheet-to-PGN, but the '3-5 events/year' segment is a thin slice of the broader chess audience.ChessCopilot — Paper to PGN + Engine Review ↗ScanChess - AI Chess Scoresheet Scanner ↗
Highly crowded: scanchess.com, xchess.ai, chessscanner.com, chesssnap.app, and ChessCopilot all already do OCR scoresheet → PGN, and ChessCopilot even bundles Stockfish review + Lichess/ Chess.com export — nearly identical feature set to the proposed BrilliantBoard.ChessCopilot — Paper to PGN + Engine Review ↗Chess Scoresheet Scanner & Chess AI Search | XChess.AI ↗Chess game scanner | Chess Scanner ↗
Proven freemium pattern in chess (Chess.com Premium, ChessCopilot unlimited-scans sub, Chess Scanner's free-scan/subscription) shows willingness to pay exists, but a player doing only 10-25 games/year won't burn through free tiers, capping ARPU severely.Improve Your Chess with a Premium Membership - Chess.com ↗ChessCopilot — Paper to PGN + Engine Review ↗
OTB chess is a durable hobby and LLM/OCR costs stay low, but the existential risk is that Chess.com or Lichess (which already auto-record online games) add OTB-scanning natively and absorb this use case overnight, killing indie tools.Premium Membership Plans | Chess.com Help Center ↗
Trivial build — OCR + Stockfish-on-device + PGN export is proven shipping product (ChessCopilot did it); only bespoke piece is the shareable annotated PDF and even that is a small extension on top.ChessCopilot — Paper to PGN + Engine Review ↗