A child's chess journey
Recording an important game, rebuilding it as a PGN and preparing a digital board for analysis cost more time and equipment than a family or small organizer could reasonably provide.
Our story
Built from the tournament sidelines.
zonChess did not start as a business plan. It started as a parent sitting in a hall, watching a child play, and noticing how much avoidable work stood between a real game of chess and everything people wanted to do with it afterwards.
A note from the developer
Built by a chess parent — not a company, and without a sponsor.
I love chess, and I started building these tools to support my own children's chess journey. Every weekend spent in a tournament hall showed me how much work sits around a real game of chess — and how much of it a phone and a laptop could quietly take care of.
SwissMax and ChessZCam are built by one independent developer. There is no large company behind them, no investor and no sponsor. They have been designed, coded and tested the hard way: in the evenings, between tournaments, with our own phones, tripods and laptops, on real tables in real halls.
My hope is that these projects become a bridge — between a child's journey through chess and a way of giving something back to the chess community that has given our family so much.
Because they are built with limited time and limited resources, please do not expect perfection. There will be rough edges, and some things will take longer than they would for a big team. What I can promise is honesty about what works and what does not work yet, and steady, visible improvement — you can see how fast things move in the changelog.
Constructive feedback is what keeps this going. Every comment helps these tools grow, one update at a time, until they can truly become part of the worldwide chess community.
What you can expectTools tested at real tournaments before they reach you, honest release notes, and direct replies from the person who wrote the code.
What not to expectA flawless, big-company product on day one. This is a work in progress, and we say so openly.
How you can helpTry the early trial, tell us what got in the way, and share what worked with other organizers, coaches and parents.
None of this would exist without the people who share their work openly — above all Peter (Pbatch), whose open-source ChessCam is where ChessZCam began. Read our thank-you and the full list of credits →
— zonChess · Motivace Studio, Malaysia
What we hold to
How the project is run.
Could a phone do it?
Could an ordinary tournament board, a stable phone camera and careful software produce a useful game record and a live overlay? The answer turned out to be yes — that became ChessZCam.
The tournament itself
Registration spreadsheets, pairing screenshots, score slips, prize lists rebuilt at midnight. Working beside organizers to fix that became SwissMax.
Keep OTB chess human
Technology should make physical games easier to record, share and celebrate — without replacing the friendships and resilience built in a tournament hall.
Build an accessible bridge
Electronic boards remain an excellent professional standard; ChessZCam is the lighter phone-camera path. SwissMax is for organizers who already trust Swiss-Manager.
Test before selling widely
Both products are tested at real tournaments before they go on sale — most recently on 19 September 2026. That is why ChessZCam is released in phases — Studio first, then Android and Live — and why SwissMax's price and date are still open.
Chess coaching, entry fees, travel and accommodation are real costs for families. Revenue from these products is intended to fund continued development and to support a young player's progress through competitive chess — we would rather say that out loud than dress it up as a startup mission.
It is also why a live tournament never depends on our servers: data stays on your machine, scoring runs on the venue network, and detection happens on the phone.
Prestige chess · good character · mind potential.
Three things a tournament hall can give a young player that a screen cannot. Everything zonChess builds is meant to serve them — which occasionally means building less software, not more.
- Prestige — posters and winner graphics that make a club event feel like an occasion.
- Character — arbiters keep authority; fair play comes first.
- Potential — games recorded, ratings understood, progress visible.
Get in touch
If you run tournaments, we want your complaints.
Every meaningful feature in both products came from someone describing a bad afternoon in a hall. Yours is welcome.