I believe that it is always possible to improve your skill in any sport. Practicing the right fundamental exercises is the key behind it. This app is designed to improve your chess board visualization. It is the single most widely accepted practice as recommended by grand masters of chess. If you are a chess club player wanting to see and calculate more precisely, then you will benefit from this app. My own teacher GrandMaster Petrk Kriakov (icc handle: Petrovich) does advice this excercise and it has benefited me a lot and I believe in this excercise a lot. The app is freely available for the iPad from the app store. I will shortly also be making an iPhone version of the same app. For now this app is just a basic version for the purpose described above. I will be adding several updates that include scoring and other visualization improvements in the short future. Please email your suggestions and comments to harish.srinivasan[at]gmail.com. View in Apple Store
Next Version
The next version of the app will be ready by March 1st 2012. Although I had originally expected it to be ready by Jan 1st, some suggestions from users have prompted some significant changes. It will include some new excercises and statistic and blindspot analysis.How it Works
- You are given two squares at random from the chess board in algaebric notation (eg. h2 e5)
- You are requierd to visualize the route a knight can take from the square h2 to e5
- You will then have to enter the squares (using the buttons provided -- see screen shot) the knight hops in the route it takes from h2 to e5. One solution to this is f3
- Since there are multiple solutions, any valid route is a correct answer. Since a knight can reach any square of the board from any starting point in a maximum of 5 hops, the user is restricted to enter not more than that.
- In the above example, you can enter f3 and then tap on next. Note you do not enter the starting square and you do not enter the destination square. You only need to enter inbetween squares
- If the question is such that there is a direct hop (such as a1 b3), then you just press next
- If you have question like f3->f3, then you enter any valid hop such g5 (it means f3->g5->f3)
- The top left screen indicates (after you have hit next) whether you got the question right or wrong and the app proceeds to the next question
- If you entered anything by mistake, a horizontal swipe on the screen will undo the last button pressed
- If you are having trouble visualizing the board, do a vertical swipe on the screen which brings up a chess board where you can optionally turn on the grid notation. Once you have the answer, swipe again to go back to the previous screen to enter the route
- You can set session goals on the main screen and you will be indicated when they are achieved
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