Most serious chess still gets recorded the old-fashioned way: a pencil, a paper scoresheet, and a player too deep in the position to think about digitizing anything. Those sheets pile up in a folder and rarely get a second look. That is a shame, because a club game you actually played is far better study material than yet another grandmaster brilliancy.
A Lichess study is the natural home for those games: one chapter per game, comments and arrows on the critical moves, and one link that a student or a teammate can open on any device. The steps below cover getting the PGN quickly, then building, annotating and sharing the study, which is where the real work is.
What You Will Need
- The paper scoresheets you want to digitize.
- A phone to photograph them.
- A free ScanChess account for the recognition and PGN export.
- A free Lichess account for building the study.
That is the entire toolchain. No special hardware, no manual transcription.
Step 1: Get Each Game Into PGN
Photograph each sheet flat, evenly lit and sharp; how to get a clean scan of a chess scoresheet has the details and a checklist. Upload the photo to ScanChess, which reads the handwriting and replays each move on a board, marking illegal moves red and doubtful ones amber; check those against the paper, replay the game once, and export the PGN. Convert a handwritten scoresheet to PGN walks through that review, and what is PGN explains the file you end up with. Repeat for each game and keep the exported files together.
Step 2: Create the Study
Log in to Lichess and create a new study from the Studies area. A study is a container for one or more games, each held in its own chapter, and it is a natural home for coaching material because chapters carry variations, comments, and drawn shapes on the board.
When you set up the study you choose its visibility: keep it private while you build it, then switch to public or unlisted when you are ready to share. You can also invite specific people as contributors if you want students or teammates to add their own notes.
Give the study a name a student will recognize six months from now: the event and the date, or the player's name and the season, rather than "Games 1".
Step 3: Import One Chapter per Game
Add a chapter, choose the PGN tab, then paste or upload the file you exported from ScanChess. Lichess parses the movetext and builds a navigable chapter you can click through from the first move to the result.
Two habits keep a study usable:
- One game per chapter. If you paste a PGN containing several games, Lichess creates a chapter for each, which is fine; what you want to avoid is several games stuffed into one chapter as variations.
- Title each chapter with the opponent and the round, or the theme if you are collecting examples ("Rook endings, round 3"). A study with twenty chapters called "Chapter 1" through "Chapter 20" is a pile, not a table of contents.
The mechanics of the import itself, including what to do when Lichess rejects a move, are in import PGN to Lichess.
Step 4: Annotate With Arrows and Comments
This is where a study earns its keep. On any move you can add a text comment explaining the idea, the plan, or the mistake. Hold the right mouse button and drag on the board to draw arrows; right-click a square to highlight it. That is the fastest way to point out a tactic or a weak pawn without writing a paragraph.
Build out the critical alternatives as variations so a student can explore "what if I had played this instead" inside the chapter. Keep annotations focused: a few well-placed arrows and two or three sharp comments per game teach more than a wall of text. A useful discipline for the student's own games is to have them add a comment at the moment they felt the game turn, before you add yours.
If you use evaluation symbols, !, ?, !? and so on, Lichess stores them in the PGN as annotation glyphs; chess symbols and annotations explains what each one means and how it is saved.
Step 5: Share the Study Link
When the study is ready, set it to public or unlisted and copy the link from the address bar or the share menu. Send it to a student, post it to your team channel, or work through it live in a lesson. Anyone with the link can replay every game, read your comments, and step through the variations at their own pace, with nothing to install.
For a lesson, the study's sync mode is worth knowing: with sync on, everyone viewing the study follows the board you are on, which turns a shared link into a whiteboard.
Why This Beats Manual Entry
Typing a game by hand is slow and error-prone, and the friction means most paper games never get studied at all. Scanning collapses the tedious part into an upload and a quick review, making it realistic for a whole stack of sheets. Coaches can turn a weekend tournament into a ready-to-teach study; club players can finally mine their own games for patterns.
You do not need to digitize a whole season tonight. Pick the most interesting recent game, put the sheet through the ScanChess scanner, and make it the first chapter; the study grows from there one game at a time.