Getting Your Games Into ChessOnyx
Four ways to load a game, and which one you actually want
There are four ways to get a game onto the analysis board, and which one you want depends on whether you are analysing a single game or building up a history you can look back on. None of them require an account, though some work better if you have one.
This article walks through all four, including the limits of each.
Search by Account Name
This is what opens by default when you import on the analysis page: pick Chess.com or Lichess, type a username, and fetch that player's recent games. No account here, no linking, nothing to set up.
It works just as well for somebody else's games as for your own. That is genuinely useful if you want to see how a particular opponent handles an opening, or to pull up a stronger player's games in a line you are studying.
Paste a PGN
The second tab in the same dialog. If you already have the moves — a game someone sent you, an export from another site, a position from a book — paste them and the board loads immediately.
Neither of these two options saves anything. Close the tab and the game is gone unless you kept the PGN yourself. For a one-off look at a single game that is usually fine. If you want the game to still be there next week, you want one of the options below.
Import From Your Profile
Once you have an account, the profile page can import games and keep them. This is the difference that matters: imported games persist, so you can come back to a game from last month and see the analysis you already ran on it.
Free members can keep up to ten saved games. That is enough to work through a recent session honestly, but it is a real limit and you will hit it if you play regularly. Pro removes the cap.
Link an Account and Use Quick Import
The last option is to link your Chess.com or Lichess account once, after which Quick Import pulls in new games without you typing a username each time. It only fetches what has appeared since your last import, so it stays fast as your history grows.
The default window is the last month. You can change that in settings — the options run from the last 24 hours up to the last year — depending on how much you want to pull in at once.
Quick Import is a Pro feature. The honest framing is that it saves time rather than unlocking anything you could not do otherwise: you can import the same games from your profile manually, it just takes more clicks.
Which One Should You Use?
If you are here to look at one game, search by username or paste the PGN and ignore everything else. That covers most visits, and none of it requires an account.
If you want to track how you are actually playing over time — which openings keep going wrong, whether your endgames are improving — you need games that persist, which means importing them from your profile. The rest is convenience on top of that.