About Hanging Pawns
Hanging Pawns is the YouTube channel of Stjepan Tomić, a Croatian chess content creator known for unusually thorough, long-form videos. Where many chess YouTubers favour fast, entertaining game commentaries, Stjepan goes the other way: hour-long deep dives into a single opening line, or careful walk-throughs of classic master games.
He came to serious chess relatively late, and a recurring theme on the channel is the adult improver journey — what works, what does not, and how to think about training time when you are not a child prodigy with a coach. That honest, study-driven framing has built a large, engaged audience of self-taught club players.
His repertoire and content lean toward classical mainstream lines: the Italian Game and Open Sicilian as White, the Slav as Black. The channel suits players who want to actually understand what they are doing in the opening rather than memorise traps.
How his Chessiverse bot plays
Stjepan's Chessiverse bot is calibrated to 2198 Elo and plays in his careful, study-driven style. It favours the Italian Game and Open Sicilian with White and the Slav with Black, rewarding patient, principled opponents over flashy attackers.