When I consulted on Wall Street I felt my mind turning to mush. Some of my co-workers would kibitz or play chess in the park, and I began playing as well. I became very focused on improving as I felt it was keeping my mind sharp, as my day job was not doing that.<p>One way to improve your chess skills is to play tournament length games against opponents at or slightly above your skill level. Then you go over the game with a better player (or a chess engine) and see where you made your worst mistakes. Then you look at those positions and remember what the proper move to do is.<p>So that's what I did. I ran crafty against my online tournament games and had it find what my worst moves were (missed opportunities and blunders). Then I ordered the moves in terms of how bad the mistake was. Then I kept looking at the boards over and over to train myself in what the right move was. If I did it long enough, I'd memorize the boards and instantly know what the right move was. Doing this improves your game.<p>I put the results here - <a href="http://blunderchess.sf.net" rel="nofollow">http://blunderchess.sf.net</a> . It requires a LAMP setup. It also has components which are useful in and of themselves - a program that converts PGN format to FEN format, a PHP function which converts a FEN line into a graphic chessboard and so forth. I put development of the suite of tools aside as I got busy and stopped playing chess and stopped working on the tools.
Hello HN! I'm Andrew, a national chess master and one of the co-founders of Chesscademy. We're a part of this year's upcoming Imagine K12 cohort and it's great to hear all of your feedback so far. I'll try to answer any questions you guys have and respond to your comments.
I'm working through "Introduction to Tactics" and I enjoyed the video, but the lessons are frustrating. I'm doing a valid "fork" or "skewer", but the examples just slap my hand and say "no, try a fork or skewer". Explanations why moves are wrong would make the examples far more useful, so I understand why the very specific combo the tutorial is looking for is the right choice.
Great work, Andrew and team!<p>I played with the Tactics interface for a few minutes. I love the clean design; the interface is delightful; "well done, tactic solved in XX seconds" animation is fun and totally addicting.<p>One gripe I have is that the quality of the tactics seems to vary widely. I'm not talking about difficulty level; some of them just don't make sense to me.<p>I'm not sure how this one, for example, qualifies as a tactic: chscd.me/tactics/16685. It's just a pawn capture. The fact that I have "solved" it after recapturing my rook seems arbitrary.<p>Out of the half dozen tactics I played through in my first visit, I had a couple other questionable ones like this. It made the site lose credibility for me. (note: I am a chess master. But my problem isn't that the tactics are too easy, it's that they are kind of random)<p>I'm curious, are you generating these tactics by hand or with software?<p>I understand you probably have a massive database of these. But it might be a good idea to have Andrew or another strong player moderate the tactics to make sure they all meet a certain standard of quality.<p>Looking forward to following your progress!
On exercises where one really struggles (yes, I'm super stupid when it comes to Chess -- I can play Go which is supposed to be harder but for some reason anything beyond the utter basics of Chess eludes me) it's very frustrating to be shown the same hint over and over again when it's irrelevant or unhelpful (e.g. "Think about the name of the tactic - the windmill... it goes around and around!" Yes, I'm thinking about it! Now give me a hint!)
Hi Andrew,<p>Thanks for the site. I find the lessons quite informative and easy to follow, but the exercises are often impossible to get right as they are expecting one series of moves vs. applying what is learned in the lesson to reach a specific goal with a specific style of play, tactic, etc.<p>As an example I am stuck on <a href="http://www.chesscademy.com/exercises/initiative-controlling-the-game" rel="nofollow">http://www.chesscademy.com/exercises/initiative-controlling-...</a><p>My current board now looks like this: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/DxjsAKx.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/DxjsAKx.png</a><p>But no matter what I do, a popup keeps telling me "that move does not uphold initiative". It doesn't tell me why it doesn't, and I assume it doesn't actually know, rather it is looking for me to make a preprogrammed move. It won't allow me to attack the queen with a defended bishop, it won't let me do a lot of things that to me would continue to force the opponents hand.<p>I am certain for you the most optimal next move is obvious, but as learner the inflexible format of the many move/exchanges exercises is really frustrating.
This looks sweet! Exactly what I was looking for.<p>One tip though, the "Start course" button is so grey that I thought it was unclickable.<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/CsBRWMB.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/CsBRWMB.png</a>
Awesome idea and implementation!<p>But: it seems to pre-populate the username from fb login on signup, but forbid characters that allowed in it (i.e. "."), causing a messed up situation in which you are half signed up.
I'm around 1000 on chess.com blitz (5min games), and found a lot of useful stuff here. Especially the positioning is what I feel like I'm losing on at the moment. I don't do big blunders anymore, but somehow I'm often in a worse position than my opponent.<p>I started a few months ago, and have progressed nicely. But lately I've been stuck. Looking up resources, they have often been too simple ("learn chess, this is how the pieces move") or too advanced ("5 variations of opening X" isn't very useful at my level of play).
I've never studied chess formally or played in a tournament, but my parents taught me the rules when I was 3, so I've picked up some of the basics and recreated things that look like the openings in the "moving past the basics course" over time, even if I don't know the official names for them.<p>The videos here are great. I've tried to pick up chess books and sites before a couple times, but I always very quickly feel like I need to memorize a few hundred board positions before anything will make sense (or worse, the "lessons" consist of nothing but THESE 3000 THINGS ARE GOOD, DO THEM). Putting things in a logical order for learning is very helpful.<p>I have to say, though, the exercises really need a better gradient of feedback, especially when you get to the later lessons with some more ambiguous positions. I only "solved" the "make your pieces happy" test by trying moves at random - I had correctly identified f5 as the target square, but I'm still unclear as to why it needs to be the left-hand knight that works its way over there. I know it would be a lot of work, but an after-action walkthrough of the solution and a couple wrong answers would be extremely helpful.
Is this yours? If it is, take a look at the buttons, they all look "deactivated". #DADFE1 is too unsaturated. Or at least, add an hover colour on it.
I've been doing tactics and it is confusing that there is a 'arrow pointing right' and 'next tactic'.<p>After I fail it should automatically restart.<p>If I fail after one move, it should say "Get checkmate in one move", otherwise I don't understand why I failed.<p>It should be win the game from this point, not move into these specific places.<p>Unless you have already determined it is detrimental to progression to continue playing out the scenario.
Great stuff. Beautiful feeling to the site, though the 'Train' section could do with an explanation as to what you're meant to do on the exercises ('tactics'). I'm tempted to suggest integrating this with en.lichess.org, a similarly awesome chess-resource.
I seem to be stuck on the first tactic (not in the chess sense). I complete it, hit the green "Next Tactic" button, and it just gives me the same one again! It's Tactic 20628, which is the first one I was given after telling the site I'm an intermediate player. Reloading the Train page puts me back on the same tactic too. Any ideas?<p>Loving the site so far apart from the above problem, though! Getting back into chess was one of the items on my to-do list for 2014. The Learn resources are looking like they'll be pretty useful. Great job!
I remember seeing this somewhere at Startup School NY. Very very impressive. I'm not a regular chess player myself but I have visited Chesscadamy a few times out of interest since then.
Wow seems nice, the website is also very well designed. Good job! I play League of Legends in Diamond level for quite some time, and I know how hard is to get to high level in a game, Chess has always intimidated me because there's just so much to learn, and playing blindly is just a waste of time IMO, but with guidance you can advance way faster, maybe I'll give it a shot and beat some friends here and there hehe, good job and thanks for sharing.
Great site! My first chess learning resource at the moment is Mato [0], I suggest to take a look at how his videos are: nice and smart. Another good thing of Mato is that he has not a strong english accent, so for one who is not english motherlanguage like me is easier to understand what he says... by the way: what about adding subtitles?<p>[0] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MatoJelic" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/user/MatoJelic</a>
The rating system for problems seems like it needs to add in some kind of variance factor, or at least a provisional period. I'm altering problems' ratings by 20+ points with my default 1200 rating despite having less than 10 problems completed. My actual strength is hundreds of points above 1200, and so if I play on this site without making an account a bunch of times, I'm going to artificially lower every problem's rating...
The training section is great, I love it, and IMHO the problems presented are harder than the ones at chess.com (which I'm paying for). The only problem that I've noticed so far is that some of the training problems end in a very strange way (e.g. opponent gives away his queen or rook for no reason whatsoever). It's not a big issue, but you should try to make it a bit more realistic.
This seems really nice. I've played chess on and off since I was a kid, but never really studied it. Lots of the basic tactics I saw in this course I remember using intuitively. It's nice to have a formalised notion of all those things, so you can consequently move forward to the more advanced stuff! :)
The site looks great!
What's the goal of the tactics? I've passed one but couldn't figure out why I "won". Is it just supposed to make me learn what a good move would be in a random situation?
If it's the case it's fine, but I think it should be better explained.
Congrats, its a very clean app.<p>I was watching the intro to tactics video and I wished there were more visual queues signaling the transition between topics. ie skewer, fork, etc. Maybe its cause I had to think a little longer about the previous topic and couldn't easily stop that train of thought.
that's really cool, but the font contrast is killer (bad) on certain parts in firefox nightly. I signed up; I can never seem to get as consistent with chess play as I'd like. I'd be thrilled if this helped me achieve those goals.<p>example : <a href="http://i.imgur.com/cqNPcgf.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/cqNPcgf.png</a> . The light blue is really difficult to focus on using a laptop panel. I found myself cocking my head to see it more clearly. It may be more the font than the color. I don't know. The more I look at it the more it's the grey that bothers me rather than the blue. I can't put my finger on it, but something hurts readability for me.
I'm working on the lessons right now. I would like some further explanations. For example, in playing the first few moves of the "Ruy Lopez," I am very curious why protecting the hanging pawn is not the correct move (whereas castling is).
I like the nice clean look of the site! Quite pleasant to use.<p>As far as content I am not in the target demographic(FM), but the Dragon section gave a useful overview of the basic motifs for the opening. Really needs more content but I am sure that will come with time.
I think I'm a pretty good chess player but a lot of the times I'm just playing the game without tactics or strategy but I win most of the time. Do tactics actually help against
a great player
how does this compare to chess.com, which is probably the most popular site for chess players these days? I paid two memberships at chess.com for others, but wondering what will be the 'selling' point for chesscademy to make it unique or stand out?
This looks awesome.<p>I also have a question for HN. I'm sure some of you are pretty good chess players. I thought it would be interesting to learn and started looking into where to start a few days ago, but was overwhelmed by the options. Does anyone have some recommendations (in addition to Chesscademy)?
The site is not helpful, and gets in the way of teaching. I am the target demographic, and went straight to the exercises. So much clicks on every step, the buttons to click on are grey and mouse focus turns them even more dull. Provide some visual clues on what buttons to click next, going forward and going backwards button both are the same color. Exercises themselves are more trivia then help in teaching what the piece does or where you went wrong. And "moving past the basics" exercises are <a href="http://i.imgur.com/c54R08y.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/c54R08y.png</a> I just left on the first exercise itself. One of the hints: Attack two pieces at once. Yeah, right. Nothing like codeacademy at all.