Instead of a plain “White to play, find the best move”, a second layer is added — when to play. You first have to find the tactical moment inside a series of moves, and only then solve it. That forces you to hunt for the signals a strong player sees without trying — loose pieces, alignments, an exposed king — and builds genuine tactical intuition on top of the simple benefit of solving puzzles. The endgame version does the same for endgame positions where different types of tactical signals exist.
The board UI makes you run a blunder check across a whole series of moves, under game-like conditions. It builds the crucial habit every player is told to have but almost nobody keeps: checking the intention of your opponent’s last move and the possibility of any hidden threats. Doing this before every move helps reduce your tendency to make silly blunders in your own games.
Two more habit-builders. The interface and scoring system will discourage you from immediately going deep into the first move you notice — you have to name your candidate moves first. In Guess the Candidates, that is the only thing you need to do, and you need to do it fast, so as to develop the habit of doing it first. In Think like a GM, you name the candidates, analyze them and choose the best one. By drilling this pair of modules, you will gradually build a structured, tree-like way of thinking while you solve puzzles anyway. Besides this, in Think like a GM you will not know whether the puzzle calls for attack or defense, which simulates thinking and evaluating in game conditions.
Analyzing your own games is one of the most boring and ignored tasks in chess improvement and one of the most decisive, so we made it easy. Connect your Lichess account and play real games on the Lichess server through the ChessVisual UI. When the game ends, the interface asks you to find mistakes in the game — with no engine help — before you are allowed to play again. The engine analysis runs in the background and merges into your notes afterwards, and you are scored on how well you judged your own play. The seamless UI converts this hard task into a quick and effortless routine.
Very often you get difficult situations in the opening where the opponent is threatening something. Without theoretical knowledge, there is a general tendency among players to play a passive move to defend everything. That eventually causes you to lag behind development and creates tactical situations in favor of your opponent. This module puts you into such situations again and again and pushes you to find developing and active moves that may sometimes appear to lose material but do not. And to ensure that you don’t blindly play the active moves without calculating, such positions have also been inserted where the passive move is indeed the best move. Now go, drill and learn the art of ignoring threats with rapid development and active defense in the opening.
The hardest part of chess improvement is not the training but sitting down to do it, and too many choices make it worse — deciding what to study today is work you have to finish before the real work starts, so most evenings end with a few random puzzles or with nothing. A study plan removes that decision. Set a goal, either a tournament you are preparing for or simply getting stronger, pick your dates, and a day-by-day schedule is filled in for you to edit. Once it exists the UI keeps reminding you what today’s work is and carries you from one activity to the next, so all you have to do is follow the plan you already made.
Visualization skill is a highly tedious thing to train, because it has to be trained blindfold. The basic board vision — square colours, diagonals, queen movement, knight geometry — is split into four blindfold speed-rush games that are actually fun to play. Besides them there are pretty hard blindfold and board-memorization puzzles with multiple difficulty modes and a solution viewer UI built specifically to reinforce deep visualization. These modules will reduce a blurry board vision when you actually need to visualize the board clearly many moves ahead.
4 Speed Rush Drills
The Diagonal GameBuild blindfold awareness of diagonals and square colors.The Knight Fork GameBlindfold awareness of knight forks. Type the forking square name.The Queen Fork GameBlindfold awareness of queen forks. Type the forking square name.The Knight Route GameBlindfold awareness of knight routes. Type the shortest route.4 Blindfold Puzzle Drills
n-Moves AheadVisualize the position n moves ahead and find & type the best move.Half-BlindfoldSame as n-Moves Ahead but the board will be hidden before display of the n moves.Complete BlindfoldCompletely visualize the position from description and find & type the best move.Complete MadmanGo mad! Completely visualize the position first. Then visualize n moves ahead. Then find & type the best move. You are crazy enough if you are doing this.Probably the most rewarding exercise in chess: replaying a great player’s games and predicting every move. Every other module prepares you for the critical moments — but it is the non-critical moments where the gap between a strong and a weak player really shows, one slightly worse move at a time. Here you play the master’s side under game conditions, and your score for each move depends on how hard the move was to find, not simply on how strong Stockfish thinks it was: 0 marks for an obvious move, 1 for an easy one, and up to 8 for a brilliancy. That is different from the simpler approach of awarding marks by the size of the engine’s evaluation numbers, and it is why you get a realistic rating performance at the end that will motivate you to do better next time. Replay a positional master to hone your positional and endgame skills — maintaining tension on the board and building harmony between your pieces — or the greatest attacker of all time to learn how an attack is prepared before the full blow lands. There is no better way to train the skill of playing well in non-critical moments.