Chesscademy – Learn How to Play Chess
chesscademy.com
chesscademy.com
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.
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.
I put the results here - http://blunderchess.sf.net . 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.
Chesscademy had a temporary hiatus when we went back to school last fall, but we've been working on it full time since January of this year. The product and user base has grown substantially since then.
You definitely got me hooked up on this for some time :) Thanks, Andrew, to you and your team!
Hope this feedback helps.
Did you guys build this as a framework by any chance or do you have plans to?
I haven't played in at least 10 years and so far it's been a nice refresher, and a good looking site as well.
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.
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.
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.
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)
I'm curious, are you generating these tactics by hand or with software?
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.
Looking forward to following your progress!
I'm curious, are you generating these tactics by hand or with software?
I'm in the process right now of going through all of the tactics and adding motif tags along with explanations for the solutions. While I'm doing this, I'll be sure to make sure that all the tactics make sense. Thank you for your feedback!
A windmill in chess is a tactical scenario where a the king is repeatedly revealed to checks by the same piece. A "revealed" check occurs when a piece moves out of the way allowing another piece behind it to attack the opposing king. This scenario allow you to move the piece freely while your opponent can only move his king. Here's a great example of a game with a windmill (and actually one of the great games of all time) The first check of the windmill occurs on move 19.
Also, some of the hints only apply to the first move (or first two). If you find that move but get stuck later on, it's irritating to be shown an irrelevant hint. In this case I got the windmill started but for some reason the last move was in a blind spot for me -- though when I went back an hour or two later it was completely obvious (but that doesn't make it less frustrating when I was stuck).
"It goes around and around"
Huh, I should repeat something.
How do you even measure what is harder for a human?
"Person A can beat person B with 90% probability, but Person C can beat Person A with 90% probability."
You'd want to limit the people you count to being, say, tournament players with stable ranks, such that e.g. their rank was not altered by the games against the last ten people they played.
My intuition is that, even if we stick to US players, Go ends up with a chain that's a few multiples of the Chess chain in length. This intuition mostly comes from Go's handicap system, where there are many levels of "I can give 9 handicap stones to a worse player and still win, but a better player can give 9 handicap stones to me and still win."
But I could be totally wrong. I've never heard of anyone try to measure this distance before and it would be awesome to get some pointers to such a study if it already exists.
Perhaps the absolute value difference in Elo rank between large communities of Go players vs. Chess players does the same thing, depending on which Elo parameters you use?
(And, uh, to get back on topic -- nice site! I'm doing some problems now.)
It would certainly be a very interesting metric, and one I would love to see calculated more formally. That said, I'm not sure it captures the intuition of "hardest game" that effectively. To be the best at a game depends primarily on the number of people who play it at the elite level and the time investment they put in, combined with the importance of natural talent. Suppose there were a game which had even longer chains than go, such as if each player always defeated the next stronger player with 90% probability, and there were 1000 players who played recreationally. We wouldn't think of this as a particularly hard game, because to be an elite player at the game, all you'd have to do is take it on with a professional level of commitment and you'd quickly move up in the ranks. So the difficulty of a game at elite levels must at some point include a hefty weighting of popularity and commercial appeal. As to the importance of natural talent in this idea, you simply can't play in the NBA if you are 5'0", and having such a physical limitation would tend to increase what people perceive of as the difficulty of the game. If there were a board game that required a 150 IQ to even understand the rules, people would definitely call it a very difficult game.
1: http://www.oddsportal.com/basketball/usa/nba/san-antonio-spu... using the highest odds and converting to probability, which is equivalent to the "best bid-offer spread"
2: http://www.oddsportal.com/baseball/usa/mlb-2013/texas-ranger...
Chess is the best researched game of all time, yet it still progressed tremendously in recent decades (thanks to becoming a professional sport in the West - around the Fischer era - and the appearance of computers, of course). We know how long the "food chain" is, but we can't tell to a certainty how long it can become (how close can a human get to perfect play), even if the pool of motivated players is very wide.
Current world champions are standing on the shoulders of the giants. Alekhine or Capablanca, geniuses as they were, wouldn't have a shot for the title if they didn't catch up with modern developments. And there are PLENTY. Memorization plays a big role these days. In one of the games in the Topalov vs Anand match, Anand slipped because he messed up the order of moves - all home preparation!! - around the 27th move or so. (Does this mean that humanity has already traversed the entire steep part of the learning curve?)
So the chain is still growing. Does it mean that chess is becoming more difficult game? It's a Platonic question, really :) Do we mean chess as such, and the innate difficulty of the game, imprinted in its rules that remain fairly stable - no major rule changes for the last couple of centuries, I believe? The IDEA of chess, so to speak?
Or do we mean chess AS IT IS PLAYED, or the reflection of the perfect idea :)
In the early era of competitive chess we had the so-called Romantic period, in which aesthetics of the game, the style, was valued over cold efficiency and - for example - it was considered ungentlemanly not to accept a gambit.
Was it just a cultural convention hurting the level of the game? Or was it a different flavor of the game, in which a player had to fullfill an additional responsibility they are now relieved from, and thus not quite the same discipline?
Just my two cents, some chaotic food for thought :) Sorry about the language, not a native speaker here.
Qualitative personalized feedback for content is in the works - optimally, we'd be able to tell you why the move you gave was incorrect and why the solution is best. This is an interesting technical challenge because it requires us to cover a large number of possible solutions.
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.
As an example I am stuck on http://www.chesscademy.com/exercises/initiative-controlling-...
My current board now looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/DxjsAKx.png
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.
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.
I agree with you. I don't want to take anything away from the terrific amount of work that went into this, it's a great achievement... but it needs to have a richer set of choices for the learner, and it would be nice if it could explain more exactly what was wrong with each of your erroneous choices, and perhaps provide a more directed set of hints that laid out what you should be looking at by explaining weaknesses in the position or "obvious" signs of opportunity, rather than demanding a very specific single course of action. Why all the alternative moves are weaker is as useful as why the good moves work. What might work is if the site had a "wiki" style of notation adding, so a richer database of explanations could be crowdsourced.
Back to the problem, if it's of any help to you, I came up with the answer by noting that I need to move my knight out of the way to get my black bishop active and onto those juicy squares defended by my pawns, and to get my white bishop out of the way to open the file for my linked up queen and rook, and also that his queen is threatening my undefended pawn so I looked to get my bishop onto that diagonal as a defender.
This position is a good example of a number of core concepts, for example that the bishops because they are on diagonals coordinate a little better with the other pieces when they are on the flanks of the attack rather than in the middle where they can clog, and that the rooks and queen benefit from open files, and that knights are useful when the position is somewhat clogged but frequently they should be exchanged for a more advantageous opening of the position. But the pedagogy here does not teach that.
I am a decent (but very rusty) chess player, but what I am good at is a little more "holistic", I play by developing my position in more or less sensible ways and then exploiting opportunities when they arise; but a lot of that is somewhat unconcious thought learned from a great deal of play, and "understanding" my position for me comes from being the one who developed it. In contrast, it is hard for me to jump in and look at a developed position and find the magic in it which is what this style of teaching requires. Probably a good set of things for me to work on, but at the same time the chess rating it gives me is absurd because I play at a much higher level than 1200 but I have tremendous difficulty getting my score to climb. I mention this because even though you and I come at this from different places, my complaint about the site is the same as yours: it's demanding a very specific set of moves and it's not really explaining or guiding as much as it needs to. Sometimes I pick the right move and it says "congrats! let's move on" and I'm thinking I have no idea what was so great about what I chose, the move seemed sensible but not stunning.
Now, I may be not the typical user (as an experienced, highly intuitive player with voids where big chunks of my skills are lacking, so the system should not be redesigned for me) but I mention it because while I can rely on some of my developed talents to solve these problems, I don't feel that this would teach those talents that I do have, and they would be very useful for learners to develop.
We're aiming to make the site far more adaptive by tailoring error responses to your moves. At the moment, I'm going through the tactics in Train and tagging them with motifs and supplying explanations for the solutions. An idea is to track the most common responses and create specific messages to be shown when those moves are made.
One tip though, the "Start course" button is so grey that I thought it was unclickable.
Other than that, this is a genius startup idea, really fun, and really addictive. I don't even intend to play chess very often and yet I'm addicted to picking up this skill now!
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 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).
It starts with basic strategy as a refresher, then intermediate, then advanced. It's nicely organized so you can skip parts you already understand.
You may also benefit from starting to study endgames. They're simpler than openings, and can help you improve your game significantly.
It is inspired & allowed, but leaves a bad taste.
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.
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.
After I fail it should automatically restart.
If I fail after one move, it should say "Get checkmate in one move", otherwise I don't understand why I failed.
It should be win the game from this point, not move into these specific places.
Unless you have already determined it is detrimental to progression to continue playing out the scenario.
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 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.
example : http://i.imgur.com/cqNPcgf.png . 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.
You can read more about the variation here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruy_Lopez#Open_Defence:_4.Ba4_N...
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.
It's surprisingly complete, I've practiced on evenings for months and I think I haven't even finished half of their program yet.
Chesscademy is also aiming towards the edtech market - schools have expressed interest in using our service in the classroom as part of their chess program. Chesscademy works both in and out of the classroom and complements instructors of all levels. For example, teachers can assign students courses and track their progress over time, using these data points to address particular topics.
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)?
I was always uncomfortable with D4 (queen's pawn) openings, so I went through the course on queen's pawn. It had 25 lessons covering everything (Slav, Albin, Benko...) and now I play D4 with confidence. It's made chess a lot more fun because I can play more varied games.
(Disclaimer: I've no connection to the app or its author, except as a happy user.)
The specifics are still up in the air, and we think being part of the Imagine K12 cohort this year will provide us with the educational expertise to create a product to sell to schools.
If you would not have gone "to the exercises ignoring all the other stuff", you would have gotten a clear 6 minute lecture where Andrew Ng explains, in detail, the position in the first exercise.
In the video, he introduces three tactics, the fork, the pin and the skewer, which are methods to attack two pieces at once.
If your comment was just plain sarcasm, then I apologize, I didn't get it.
This is the problem. He/She conveyed it better. A single hint buried under verbose reading, and then a freaking pop-up saying the same hint.
I think GP comment is right to some extent. I went in with the "moving past the basics" and watched the whole video, it didn't teach me anything I didn't know.
I found the setting up of the positions distracting - it should either have been set-up in advance or he should have talked about the positions, named the openings and such, or kept quiet. You're watching moves but they don't relate to what he's saying until the position is set and we start the actual lesson.
The grey "move on" button was not at all obvious, standard "go" green would help.
When you complete the exercises it simply prevents you moving the last piece rather than indicating on the board that the exercise is complete and you did it. It doesn't look like there is more than one possible response either, which means that additional hints could tell you the next move they're expecting. The examples were facile until the "combining tactics" - then I did Bf4 (bishop from c1 to f4) and the exercise just sticks ... did I do it or is it glitch, there's no feedback. Should I click to move on? There's no affordance or visual indication as to what to do next. Similarly there's no explanation - AFAICT - why you did right [?] moving to f4 (protects c7 for the knight to do the king-rook fork?).
The quiz questions get the feedback correct, they show the answer in green (don't know what they do if you get it wrong ;0)) but the last question then goes to a further question "undefined", what now? Should I click the greyed out arrow to move on?? Is part one over?
The board: when learning usually you get piece move highlighting wherein you click a piece and it tells you the available moves via highlights on the squares. That's usually paired with ability to click the destination rather than dragging the pieces which can be a bit awkward.
Oh, just went back to first exercise to see if it did "move highlighting". The pawn when dragged over e3 changes the "undo" to "move on", now I can't see if there are any other valid moves. Perhaps I twitched, did I get it right? Which square was the right one?
Logged in, slight problem as I had js disabled, but easy to handle and not unexpected. Takes me on to "Tactic 14954" - I've done a move (Bf5) and board is frozen, did I win? Same as with the exercises. Is the board waiting for the server to tell it the next move, is there a js engine that's computing the next move?? I'm assuming it's done but the only available button says "give up", so ...?
Aside: Is there a way to export chess problems easily to a local chess board? That would be great, could use the videos, export to a local board with extra features and that would let you play on the positions and such.
It's a good start. Looks generally nice but there are some pretty big UX problems that cross in to genuine bugs in utility IMO.
[Using FF31 on Kubuntu]
Edit: Apologies, it appears to be a problem with FF31.0 for me, Chrome is working, giving feedback and such. Will let comment stand.
I'm towards the end of "Diving Deep" and I'm ready to give up as the exercises continually lead me to brute force moves until I hit the specific move you are looking for.