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Comment by CWuestefeld | Hacker News Reader

Other than the board, that page is completely opaque to me. There's a whole bunch of what are apparently technical stats, but I can't even infer enough to know whether big numbers are good or bad.

This would be a whole lot more engaging with more explanation, at least hover tips over all the fields and so forth.

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Yes you are right it is not a very good UX. For me the most interesting part is observing the evaluations of the position from the perspective of 2 engines. See the charts that track it move by move. It is often the case that one engine sees something that other doesn't. For example, say, that it is completely busted. I imagine internal dialogue: I'm fine, I'm fine, am I in trouble... oh $^#^ I'm losing now. It was especially true in the early days of neural chess engines which saw ideas which were well beyond the event horizon of traditional engines. Most people who are watching these tournaments on twitch are chess engine developers themselves that's why interfaces like these are fine for them.

The top line "eval" number is who is winning - positive means white is winning and negative means black is winning. "TC" is the time control - right now they are playing at 30 minutes + 5 seconds per move (for each side). Most of the other numbers are diagnostics about the chess engine's calculations.

Generally, their audience is "people who play chess" - and those people can be assumed to know this. If you don't play chess, watching a broadcast on Twitch or YouTube will be more enjoyable.

This website is niche enough that I think they are better of optimizing for what in-the-know users want than dumbing it down for people passing by. I recognize that is not really what you are asking for though, and I agree that they could do better with tool-tips and the likes.

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