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Show HN: Checkmate Champ – a training tool for chess tactics

by Tommah on 1/20/24, 8:41 PM with 39 comments

• by jurassicfoxy on 1/20/24, 10:09 PM

  I love curated checkmate training, and I would disagree with the other posters. I would in fact recommend you don't make the training "random", but keep them in line with the book. Presumably, like Polgar Mates, there's a sequence to it.

  The main thing I'd recommend is having illegal moves do nothing, and make drag and drop more clear. The "floating ghost piece" is actually not the cursor, and that's kinda not very nice UX. You might try a "click to place" technique instead of drag & drop.

  Is this book out of copyright now?

• by gurchik on 1/20/24, 10:03 PM

  > Positions marked "1001" are taken from Fred Reinfeld's 1955 book 1001 Ways to Checkmate.

  How did you enter these positions into the app? Manually?

  One idea you can try to avoid manual work:

  First, download a game database, like for example a Lichess database,[1] or a database of Masters games. After parsing the PGN, check if the game ended in checkmate. If so, then at the very least you have a Mate in 1 puzzle. Using your engine, you can check the last couple positions of the game to see if there was a longer forced mate. If the game didn't end in a checkmate, it's still possible the resignation was due to forced mate, so you can do a similar process to check the final position.

  By removing manual entry, you can add a lot more metadata that the user can search for to customize their training. For example, you could add the ability to train specifically on rook checkmates or knight checkmates, or queen sacrifices, or checkmates that occur in the back rank, or endgame checkmates (positions where there are few major pieces on the board).

  ^1: https://database.lichess.org/

• by colund on 1/21/24, 12:15 AM

  Other chess apps have the mouse approximately in the center of the piece so that when you drop the piece it's dropped where the piece and the mouse is located. I've accidentally dropped the pieces on the wrong squares on this page, since the mouse is to the right of the piece.

• by Euphorbium on 1/20/24, 10:26 PM

  I dont want to know exactly how many moves it is in advance. Changes the thinking.

• by gokhan on 1/20/24, 11:44 PM

  For tactics training, one can also check https://chesstempo.com/chess-tactics/

• by SubiculumCode on 1/20/24, 11:09 PM

  The best app for chess problems I've used is 'Chess Tempo'

  Really large set of curated problems, which can be divided into particular problem types (e.g. attaction or desperado tactics). Further, after you do the problem, community discussion forum of that problem becomes available, where they discuss alternate choices and their problems etc. It really is high quality.

• by Vvector on 1/21/24, 1:27 AM

  Instead of using "<<" and ">>" buttons, with instructions and popups explaining these mean next puzzle and previous puzzle, just make that the label on the buttons.

• by AlchemistCamp on 1/20/24, 10:04 PM

  Woah! It's been a while since I've seen an HTML <center> tag.

  Were you doing web dev way back in the day or is this based on a template you modified? It reminds me a lot of a tool I once made. It was before I was programming professionally but I had a blog and was figuring out bit by bit how to customize things and animate them. Fun times!

• by nomilk on 1/21/24, 1:14 AM

  Great tool! I like that the solution puts you in the eyes of the defender (so you can see all variations of the solution). I didn't really like how the board gets reversed though.

• by tibanne on 1/20/24, 9:59 PM

  This is quite fun. I tried the first 5 where you seems to just sac your queen in each. Maybe adding variation in the types of mates could make it more engaging?

• by lifthrasiir on 1/21/24, 2:04 AM

  One thing I observed during my format analysis was that the solution mode was not very intuitive. It is not clear that the "Reset position" would restart the animation (which cannot be paused by the way), and you can make a move even when the animation is still playing.

• by bluGill on 1/21/24, 1:35 AM

  Can the chessboard be bigger on mobile? My old eyes need to zoom in and then the other buttons dissapear

• by wly_cdgr on 1/21/24, 10:38 PM

  Why would I use this over the puzzles on chesscom, where the UI is much better, where the puzzles are integrated with social features, where there are many more puzzles and you have more control over the type and difficulty of the puzzles you see, etc?

• by 0x4164 on 1/21/24, 1:35 PM

  Cool collection! But I keep right clicking and dragging due to my habit in online chess platforms of making circles and arrows, instead it just shows context menu.

• by nurettin on 1/21/24, 5:29 AM

  I kept sacing my queen, and it kept on working!

• by 29athrowaway on 1/20/24, 11:07 PM

  I wonder what happened to Chesscademy.

• by snissn on 1/20/24, 10:43 PM

  anybody have any suggestions for learning openings?

• by bmacho on 1/21/24, 10:27 AM

  Meh. There are a TON of good puzzles there, this one is not good, the UI is sluggish. I see the mate, then I should enter it as fast as I can, and not in 6 seconds or so.