How to Get an Eval Bar on Chess.com Live Games (2026)

Chess.com shows you an evaluation bar when you open the analysis board — but the moment you're in an actual live game, it disappears. That's on purpose: a live eval bar is exactly the kind of help that would be cheating in a rated game, so Chess.com hides it. To get an evaluation bar on a live board, you add one yourself with a browser extension.

Why Chess.com hides the eval bar in live games#

The evaluation bar is a running readout of who's winning, straight from an engine. In post-game analysis that's a learning tool. During a live game against another person, it would tell you your position is losing before you've realized it yourself — which is why no honest platform shows it mid-game. So there's no setting to toggle. The bar has to come from a separate tool that runs its own engine on the position it can see on screen.

That's what a Stockfish browser extension does.

How to add a live eval bar to Chess.com#

Here's the full setup with ChessSolve. It takes about a minute.

1. Install the extension#

Add ChessSolve to your browser from the download page. It's a Chrome-compatible extension, so it works in Chrome, Edge, Brave, and other Chromium browsers.

2. Log in#

Open the extension popup and log in. There's a free tier, so you can see the live eval bar and arrows without paying.

3. Open a Chess.com board and start#

Go to any Chess.com board — a game, a puzzle, or the analysis page — open the ChessSolve popup, and click Start. The extension reads the current position, runs Stockfish 18 on it, and draws:

• an evaluation bar showing who stands better and by how much, and
• best-move arrows pointing to the engine's top choices.

Both update automatically as the position on the board changes. There's no scanning or copying moves — it follows the board you're looking at.

Reading the eval bar once you have it#

An evaluation bar is only useful if you know what it's telling you. The number is measured in pawns from White's point of view: +1.0 means White is up roughly the value of a pawn, -2.5 means Black is winning by about two and a half pawns, and anything past about +3 usually means one side has a decisive advantage.

The swings matter more than the raw number. A bar that jumps from +0.3 to -2.0 after your move is telling you that move was a mistake — and that's the moment to stop and figure out why. Our guide on reading engine evaluations goes deeper on what the numbers actually mean, and why Stockfish suggests the move it does helps you turn the bar into understanding instead of just a scoreboard.

Use it the right way#

To be blunt about it: a live eval bar is a study and review tool. Running it during a rated game against another person is cheating, full stop, and it's against Chess.com's fair-play rules. Where it's genuinely valuable is:

• Reviewing your own games move by move to see where the evaluation turned.
• Studying openings and positions to see how the engine assesses them.
• Training against the analysis board, testing candidate moves and watching the bar respond.

Used that way, a live eval bar is one of the fastest ways to build a feel for evaluating positions on your own — which is the whole point.