Practise on your own

The Practise tab is a list of things to work at, arranged by phase of the game: your own play first, then tactics, then endgames and technique. None of it needs a trainer.

Play against the engine

A game at the strength you choose. New game asks for your side, the engine's strength as a rating from 800 to 3000 or Maximum, the clock — Untimed, one of the presets or Custom — the opening, and whether the game is rated. The screen starts at your own rating, or at 1200 before you have one. Beside the engine's strength it lists the human-like opponents, a card each, and on a phone Change opens that list. The engine opens from a book of games between strong players, as far as a player of its strength would know it, so you meet the openings people play; an opening you choose By name… or from My repertoire is a line the engine follows on its side while you stay on yours.

A rated game has no Take back and no engine help; its result moves your rating. In an unrated game Take back removes your move and the engine's reply. Resign ends a game; leaving a timed game resigns it too, an untimed one waits for you. On a clock each side's first move is free and a flag is a loss. When the game ends you hear how, the rating that changed, and the first of your moves the book does not know; Review entire game, Open in Analysis, Play again and Rematch stand under it. Every finished game is kept with My games, so the opening report, the profile and the mistakes read it like any other. Statistics on the card shows your games by colour, speed and strength, your rating over time and what to work on next. In Analysis, Play from here under Board starts an unrated game from the position on the board.

My games

Your own games, and what went wrong in them. Import games, in the bar above, takes a PGN export from wherever you play, and a later one adds to the pile. Out of them the app builds three views: View opening leaks — where your opening keeps letting something in — Profile and habits, and Repertoire from games, which turns what you actually play into the start of a repertoire.

In Opening leaks, a click on a position's board shows it large enough to read. Open in Analysis takes the position to Analysis with the moves of the latest game that reached it, and with the moves you played there and the engine's better one as branches; going back returns you to the report where you left it. Losing habits lists every move you keep playing that the engine says loses, and the button under the list puts all of them into My mistakes. It stands at the top of the report, above the positions where your score is low. Each position also lists the games that reached it, newest first, and each of those opens whole in Analysis, standing on the position. The numbers are complete as they are; Judge moves adds an opinion of the moves you play again and again.

My mistakes

The positions where you went wrong, handed back to you as exercises. Play the move you should have played, or Show answer, and then say How well did you recall it? — Again, Hard, Good or Easy. The answer decides when the position comes round again, so the same error gets harder to repeat. Open this game in Analysis shows where it happened, and Remove from drill takes a position out of the drill.

Opening repertoire

Not puzzles but decisions: what you would play, position by position, kept and rehearsed. It has a page of its own — building a repertoire.

Tactics tailored to you

Puzzles from the Lichess database, chosen by your rating and by the motif you are weakest at; your rating is kept per motif rather than as one number, so the pins keep coming until the pins are solid. Show solution is there when a position will not give.

Puzzles: Mate in 1, 2 or 3 moves

Solve forced checkmate sequences in the requested number of moves. Choose the depth and work through them; the answer is a forced mate, not the best move.

Endgames from real games

Endgames as they actually occurred, from real games played at every level from club players to grandmasters. The list opens with nothing ticked: tick the kinds you want to drill, and narrow them further with a filter — for instance Opposite-colored bishops only. In a position you can Play to the end against the tablebase, which defends by the longest road to mate, or Start over, and where the point is a draw rather than a win, Conclude draw. Show solution names every move that holds and counts the position as not solved, so it comes back under Retry failed. Tablebase findings lists every legal move, the best first for whichever side is to move, with how many moves it takes to mate or to be mated; with seven pieces the tablebase often does not know that distance, and the list says so and shows the distance to the next capture or pawn move instead. After a correct move the opponent answers with the toughest defence the tablebase knows. A position with eight or more pieces has no tablebase: it carries Engine estimate, and a wrong move is said to be the engine's judgement rather than a fact. Once a position is solved, its answer shown, or a drill over, Open in Analysis opens it in Analysis as a tree of moves — yours, the other moves that hold, the move played in the game, and the drill — with the Syzygy panel and the engine one tap away. Back returns to the same position, and Next keeps to the endings and level you chose. In a Hold a draw position that was lost in the game, Punish puts you on the other side, just after the move that lost it, to play the win to the end. Include online games adds games played online to the ones the positions are chosen from; they are left out by default, because online ratings run on a different scale. Game blunders opens Game mistakes: a game walked from where it first went wrong, stopping at every mistake for you to find the better move. On a computer the letters shown on the endgame screen do the same as its buttons.

Practice basic checkmates

Checkmate the opponent in classic mating positions against Stockfish. The engine defends properly, which is what makes queen and king against king worth practising at all.

Find the winning path

Play winning positions out against Stockfish with optional Blunder Alert. You are given a position that is won and have to convert it; with the alert on, the app stops you at the move that throws it away instead of letting the game drift.

What comes back later

Your mistakes return on their own, spaced out over days, in My mistakes: a mistake you drilled last week turns up again there to see whether it stuck.