Last updated on January 4th, 2026 at 10:42 am
Chess Opener PRO – Strategy Game Review
Chess Opener PRO is a Strategy/Board/Education game from Stanislav Basovnik, first launched in 2nd March 2020.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 80+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Chess Opener PRO Stand Out
Features:
- Chess opening tree with game statistics
- The Encyclopedia of Chess Openings (ECO)
- Database of top 100+ grandmasters’ repertoires
- Stockfish chess engine analysis
- Compare ECO, opening tree and engine moves side by side in any position
- Import and export chess openings in PGN format
- Build your own opening repertoire
- Add or edit comments on moves
- Automatically classify any sequence of moves using the ECO system
- Chess opening explorer highlights moves already in your repertoire
- Chess database includes all transpositions
- Interactive trainer to memorize your chess openings and variations
- Train multiple variations at once against random opponent moves from your repertoire
- Set up a starting position for training
- Track your training progress
- Customize chessboard colors and chess pieces
- Supports dark mode
- No ads
- Works completely offline
CHESS OPENING EXPLORER
Search in the Encyclopedia of Chess Openings, browse the chess opening tree, explore the opening repertoires of famous chess grandmasters, or ask the chess engine to find the best moves. Swipe left or right to switch between the exploration features in any position.
BUILD YOUR OPENING REPERTOIRE
Add your favorite opening lines to your repertoire using the chess opening explorer or import your openings in PGN format from other chess programs. You can always edit the names of your openings and organize them in your repertoire.
OPENING TRAINER
A simple and efficient method to memorize variations of openings in your repertoire. You can train either white’s moves or black’s moves only or both. Optionally, you can train all variations at once. The trainer chooses the opponent’s moves randomly from your opening repertoire. Chess Opener tracks your progress and shows your stats.
This Strategy game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Chess Opener PRO is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 2nd October 2025
Recent improvements include:
- Performance improvements
- Bug fixes
Download & Availability
Chess Opener PRO is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Chess Opener PRO on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
By chance while checking for any update to Vicolis Chess Studio, we found this outstanding chess opening app! Our chess suffers from constant weak opening play and after a few dedicated hours with this program we have improved significantly when using our three favorite Black openings as we play opponents on-line. We have several other iPad chess opening apps that for several reasons including being BORING to use never made much difference to our opening play as Black. The interface is easy to learn and use, a crucial factor in its effectiveness. Its features are well chosen and add the feeling to explore. The ability to replay Grandmasters openings with Stockfish assisting our understanding their game positions is a special feature to us. (Some favorite past Grandmasters we hope will be added to the 100+ available.) A wonderful addition to our iPad chess applications.
Seems to be the best opening trainer on iPadOS. Not perfect, but very useful.
We cant say enough good things about this app. Its simple to use, has a World Champion chess engine with a beautiful interface. It keeps board and piece options simple but all are quality options that most tournament players use. Using this app creates an opening repertoire that can be adjusted with ease. Using Stockfish you can explore and build openings that fit your temperament . Chess opener is the only app you need to become a strong opening player. Since we bought this app we stopped using Chessbase because on an IPad Chess Opener is convenient and enjoyable to use.
It's a pleasure to use. We like our purple board and we like our reps we built. Number of stockfish lines we can set to 2 in settings.
Helps you memorize openings by repetition of lines. Great work.
This app is nearly perfect. We would only like a feature that allows us to start study from a later position in game by importing starting at e.g. Move 17. Would have emailed this privately but could not find email. Would be happy to change review to 5 stars.
Awesome app. Has 1000s of openings and various ways to learn and practice. Highly recommend it. The best of its kind.
We have many options on PC for viewing databases and the opening tree of how often moves are played in a certain position. We have explored several apps for iPhone and iPad and none of them even come close to what we want. But this app really does it. Its very close to chessx or scid on PC. We will use this for our chess students.
Where can we get a user guide on how to use this app? Its clearly powerful but it needs instructions. Ill improve our review if we can get some help information.
This app is just good. A bit confusing to use but when you get the hang of it than it is just good. Crashes quite often and needs a update asap.
Really nice and you can review lines while training. We have tried them all and this is the best for the serious tournament player.
Very happy with this training tool. Well worth the money for the pro version. Could use iCloud integration to keep the databases the same on all devices. Easy 5 stars even without this.
We love this app. Ive tried a ton of these opening trainers but they either showed refuted openings as the best lines or had minimal databases and weak engines. Our only issue with the app is that when we try to import chess.com games we get an invalid PGN error. Ive even tried removing the event data and just having the moves and we still receive the same error. Edit: Thank you to the developers for responding. Removing the brackets has fixed our issue! Thanks a ton.
If this had iCloud sync across our devices for our repertoire then it would have 7 stars for us but for now we can only give it 5 stars You can import PGN for now or make the moves to add a new opening for training.
Love this thing. Its soooo good. Ive them all. This is it.
Truly great app. We have the pro version. We use it every day. One grumble, sometimes it repeats the same variation for no apparent reason.
Ignore the 1-star ratings. We had given up on the iPad for opening training before we stumbled across this app. Excellent conception and implementation! Thank you.
Fantastic app. Beautiful. Cough up that money, its worth it. Perfect for opening training. And support split screen now.
This app is an excellent training aid, as most of the other reviews have mentioned. The one thing its missing, as of this writing, is the split screen option, which is standard for most apps. It would be very helpful.
Great multi-usage opening app, and very intuitive to use. The animated piece movement added in the last update is very helpful. One suggestion is if the forward and backward move buttons on the bottom of the iPad version could be made larger, it would be helpful for users with larger hands to tap. Thanks for the great app.
Truly great app. We have the pro version.
We wish we could post a sceenshot of all the opening trainer apps we have. This one is the best by far, super nice and responsive dev, great options.
We need split screen so we can have a chess book or app on one side and your app on the other.
Does not train beyond opening position. Useless.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.24.3
- Size: 144.54 MB
- iOS: 15.1 or later
- Languages: EN, FR, DE, ES
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: Stanislav Basovnik
Last updated: 2nd October 2025 | Genre: Strategy, Board | Developer: Stanislav Basovnik