Interview with the Founder of fiftymoves.com

We conducted an interview with the Founder and Developer of Fiftymoves.com. Check out the interview and visit the website.

Founder and Developer – Ilshat Valitov

One of the many reasons behind starting checkmatedaily.com is not only to bring out the performances of various Indian players but also to highlight various people in the chess universe who are trying to build/create something which is useful and beneficial for the greater good of the chess family.

These days there are various chess websites. Which one to visit? Which is your worth your time? That is for you, the reader, is to decide. We decided to conduct an interview with the Founder and developer of fiftymoves.com – Mr. Ilshat Valitov.

How did you come up with fiftymoves.com?

I spent a long time deciding whether the domain needed the word “chess” in it. In the end I went with Fifty Moves. It comes from the fifty-move rule, which is an endgame rule, so it fits the project even though it doesn’t say chess directly.

Puzzle solving

Please tell us about yourself.

I’m a solo developer and I build and maintain everything myself: web, iOS and Android. I’m also an active player. I did send a few endgame studies to composing tourneys, but composing is genuinely hard. It needs an artistic sense of beauty, not just correctness, and that is a different skill. I mostly wanted to try it and get a bit of experience from the inside.

Puzzle collections

What makes this different from other endgame sites?

There isn’t really a platform dedicated only to endgames. On the big sites endgames get the smallest share of everything. Here the whole thing is endgames and nothing else. Launched in March 2026, over 100,000 positions, web plus iOS and Android.

The positions are sorted by material, so you can pick exactly what you want to work on. The puzzles are split by what they ask from you: tactics, mates, and positions where you have to show theoretical knowledge. On top of that there are composed studies where you can play out the side lines instead of only the main solution, so you can try your own idea and see why it fails. Every puzzle has its own rating, which will get more accurate as more people solve.

Courses are coming as well, split the same way, by rating and by material, so a 1500 player working on rook endgames lands exactly where they should. Plus different training modes that work on the same skills from another side.

There’s also a research section, fiftymoves.com/lab, where I publish statistics on endgames: how top players handle them, which endgame types come out of which openings, how endgames are distributed across rating levels, and more. It’s the part I enjoy building most, and I keep adding to it.

User statistics

There’s also a Telegram channel, t.me/fiftymoveschess, with a puzzle every day. You pick the move right there in the channel, it tells you if you were right and keeps the stats, and if you want to go deeper you can jump straight to that same puzzle on the site or in the app.

fiftymoves.com on Telegram

Why did you start it?

Like every player I have gaps in my game, and the endgame is where they show up most. When I looked for material, the picture was obvious: there is a huge amount on openings and tactics, and very little on endgames. So I decided to build the resource that was missing, a place where players can actually study and practice this part of the game, especially young players.

What are your future plans?

First, test and launch the training modes (Learn coordinates, Memory challenge, Tactic streak, Position evaluation, Time pressure, Win in 50 moves, Hold a draw, Blindfold chess). Then theoretical courses with practical exercises sorted by rating and by material.

After that, a model that can automatically recognise the motif or pattern in an endgame position and show the relevant theory for it. And expanding the analysis of online games from Chesscom and Lichess.

The puzzles and studies are free today and will stay free. The paid part will be the courses and structured training programs.

What else do you do?

Fifty Moves is what I do full time, so most of my day goes into it. Around that I’ve been learning ML and LLM, partly for the pattern recognition model above, and I spend a lot of time on automation. I like looking at chess from the algorithmic side.

Links

fiftymoves.com: Website and Telegram