Matetricks

Thank you so much!

Our first iteration of the site took 2 months to build. The three co-founders worked on it from June - August of last year and the product was well received by HN (we reached the top post a year ago as well).

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.

Thanks for the feedback! We'll work on improving the contrast so that the buttons are more obvious.

We're looking to partner with schools districts to add Chesscademy to the academic setting. Optimally, anybody would be able to set up their own chess club using the site and Chesscademy could work well with instructors both in and out of the classroom. For example, a teacher could assign courses to students and track their progress. The in-class lesson material could be derived from these observations.

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.

Thanks for the feedback! I'm actually going through all of the tactics now and adding motif tags and explanations. Hopefully, this will make the solutions a bit more evident.

Thanks for the note! We'll look into improving the coloring of the buttons so that they are clearer.

Subtitles are definitely something we want to add! It's a bit of a time-intensive process for our small team, but it's on the road map.

Yes, we're currently using Glicko-2 but we're not accounting properly for the Rating Deviation that incorporates previous games played (tactics attempted). This will be fixed in a future update. Thanks for the report!

Good idea - we might prompt the user to go back and review the video if they seem to be struggling with the exercises.

Sure - we're built on Rails.

We're working on incorporating personalized qualitative feedback into the content so you're provided with an explanation of why your move is incorrect and why the solution is optimal. Specific explanations for every move is probably infeasible, but we should be able to provide reasons for the most commonly played moves.

Thanks so much for the feedback! This comment is immensely valuable in helping us test cross-browser compatibility. Glad to hear everything's working smoothly on Chrome.

In the videos before each set of exercises, I try to lay out all of the key ideas so you have in your arsenal everything you need to successfully complete the lesson. I probably don't succeed in this goal all of the time, so your feedback is very useful for me in rethinking how a user progresses through the exercises. Providing an option to read the solution after a certain number of incorrect moves may improve the overall experience and discourage brute-forcing the answer.

Thanks for the feedback! We're looking into ways to improve the typography so that it's clear universally for our users.

You're probably using tactics in your games even if you don't realize it. In many cases, winning material is the result of playing a tactic. At the beginner/intermediate level, almost all games are decided by tactics and/or blunders (i.e, your opponent losing a piece). Increasing your vision over the board offers up more opportunities for you to play combinations against your opponent and avoid falling into traps.

Thanks for the report! We'll look into this issue.

An onboarding process for "Train" is in the works - right now for the beginner player, this section is rather overwhelming and he or she probably would have no idea what to do. The objective is to find the best move in any given position but that information isn't very obvious.

We're trying to structure Chesscademy such that it provides a feeling of progression. A problem that I had while I was playing competitively was to identify material that would take me to the next level instead of covering information that was too easy/difficult for my current playing ability. Each course should provide you with the requisite knowledge to complete the next one.

Unfortunately, there's no option to "give up" just yet on exercises. We're looking to implement a feature where after an incorrect number of answers, you're given the option to read the solution. It's probably less frustrating this way than forcing users to attempt to brute-force the exercise.

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.

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.

Great blog post. It's interesting to compare my knowledge of opening evolution with the historic data. During the Romantic Era, King Pawn games were clearly the norm. When Reti and Nimzowitch introduced hypermodernism in the 1920s Indian openings became much more popular.

What do you think is the world's most valuable company?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Aramco

Great app! Curious as to what the benefits are over Lichess.

Also, you might want to consider using chessboard.js: http://chessboardjs.com/

If anyone's interested in how I studied chess, I wrote a few posts on my blog on chess.com about it: http://www.chess.com/blog/Matetricks

I became a National Master when I was 13 and I played a lot as a kid.

I agree that the World Championship is rather arbitrary nowadays, but we already have the tournaments for a "Chess Grand Slam." Dortmund, Linares, Tata Steel, and the Tal Memorial are known as the strongest four tournaments during the year, aside from Candidates. These could serve as the benchmark for what the author is suggesting, but large tournaments aren't the answer to everything.

There is certainly a difference between match play and tournament play - personally, I feel that the World Championship should still be decided by a one vs. one match. Carlsen has demonstrated his dominance in tournament play and is clearly the favorite, but Anand's match experience allows for a competitive dynamic.

Of course, the entire system is a bit unfair and convoluted. Recall the whole World Chess Federation business from the 90s and the Offical vs. Unofficial World Championship nonsense. Carlsen abstained from the 2011-2012 cycle because of his dissatisfaction with the extant process. Nevertheless, I feel that this title is a bit too harsh. I'm supportive of a balance between larger tournaments and a bracket-style approach to decide on a world champion, not abolishing the title altogether.

I use Elevatr. Right now it's only available as an iOS app. It's specifically tailored to entrepreneurs as you have to input a few key aspects every idea should have, namely market fit, product features, pain, value proposition, etc. They recently introduced an interesting feature where you can "Make Moves" on your startup - I clicked the button, and a few days later they reached out to me to discuss my startup and how they could help connect me to app developers in New York City.

This was some awesome feedback! I spent some time trying to approach the exercises from the perspective of a complete beginner, and I tried to design them accordingly. This is invaluable information that will help me design future lessons. Thank you for your detailed and rigorous analysis.

Ah sorry, we were blocked by Dropbox! We weren't expecting this much traffic and we're moving our videos over to AWS soon. We're going to use Box as a quick fix in the meantime.