National Master Reviews Chess Tactics for Beginners by Convekta

April 21, 2010
Tags: Product Reviews, New, Etc

National Master Kayden Troff wrote the following review of Chess Tactics for Beginners:

Chess Tactics for Beginners

Don’t be fooled by the name!! This chess software isn’t just for beginners, but it is great for beginners all the way up to about a 1200 level! It was made by Russian chess coaches, and it is very easy to use. My brothers and I all teach private chess lessons each week and one of the things that we require each one of our students to get is this software. We have them do a certain number of problems from it every day and it really helps!

When my family first bought this software we had to buy it from England because it wasn’t available in the United States and we had to pay a lot more for it than what Wholesale Chess.com sells it for. We have bought a lot of chess software but the thing I really like about this software is that you don’t have to flip to the back of a chess book to see the answer, but you can see it right there.

The Chess Tactics is Great for Beginners
The other thing I like is that if you get one wrong move, it gives you the chance to correct that move instead of getting the whole problem wrong. With a book, you have already seen the answer so you have no way to fix your mistake on your own. The software will let you try two or three times before you get a “frowny face” for a wrong answer and you will still get points towards the finishing the problem if you guess it right on your second or third try. This is really great for beginner and intermediate students who may make lots of mistakes and get frustrated with the problem. They don’t need to feel like they have no success. If you get lots of chances then it suddenly makes things seem not so hard.

Chess Tactics Progresses with You
Another great thing about this software is that it starts out with easy “mate in one” problems and then progresses to “win a Knight in one move” problems and “win a Bishop in one move” and then a Rook and a Queen until you get to “mate in two” problems and “win a Knight in two moves” etc. By the time that you actually get into it you don’t even realize that the problems are getting a little harder each time because it starts easy and builds, and before you know it you’re to the end of the 1200 or 1300 problems and you have learned a ton! Some people say that all you learn is pattern recognition when you solve puzzles and this may be true in a way, but to look for it more in your games and you see it more because you are used to seeing it.

Chess Tactics Measures Your Performance
One of the other things I like about this software is that it gives you an ELO rating on the strength of your performance. This helps to see how you are improving and getting better. Also, you can have lots of different usernames so everyone in your family can have their own username with their own rating and you can even have more than one username of your own so that you can compare how you did vs. how you are doing now on the same problems.

Chess Tactics has Varying Playing Modes
When you are really ready to take it up a notch then you can switch from practice mode to test mode. In test mode you can specify a range of problems that you want to “test on”. So if you are feeling particularly smart then you can set the range for the “mate in three” problems or the three move problems to win material. And then the test mode will throw these problems at you at random and you’ll have to figure out whether it is a mate problem or a win material problem. You can also say how many problems that you want to test on. So if you only want to do ten problems then you set your test at ten. If you want to do 50 or 100 then you get to choose. Another cool feature is that you can specify the test for the chess puzzles that you missed and it will put these together and throw them at you again.

Chess Tactics Saves Current Games
When you just do tons of problems in practice mode the software will track which problems you have completed and you can shut it off and it will resume where you left off the next day. It also tracks your percentage of correct answers and this is important so that you can see if you are getting the correct answer 80% of the time or 90% of the time or 50% of the time.

How I Use Chess Tactics for Training
So let me tell you a couple of ways that we use it as a trainer to give you some ideas of how it will strengthen your chess. One of my first chess teachers had my brothers and I just work through all 1300 problems and track how long it took us to do it. So for example: we might do fifty problems a day and it might take 60 days for us to complete the entire thing. Then he would have us go through it again and expect us to be able to do the entire thing in half of the time (or 30 days). We would then go through it again and try to cut it down to 15 days and by this time we would be tracking our progress in hours for those 15 days. My older brother Jeremy and I would race each other on two computers as we would try to cut our time and we were able to cut our time to 8 hours for the entire thing with a 90% accuracy rate.

My dad would also track my progress in another way. I would create a new user id each morning and then test out on a certain section of 50 problems. I would always try to get 85-90% on my test and my dad would check up on this when he got home from work. This allowed me to focus on specific tactics and to really work hard to get a good percentage each day.

All in all, I highly recommend this software!!

NM Kayden Troff

You can buy Chess Tactics for Beginners at Wholesale Chess!