Chess King - Learn to Play

Chess King is an amazing comprehensive suite of chess learning software. From learning the game through master level, Chess King has it fully covered! Openings, tactics, strategy, blunders, end games, mating patterns, (etc.) and there’s a Chess King suite for that component of chess! Thousands of lessons, examples, and training tests! An unbelievable account of teaching materials! And, the quality of the materials is of the highest level! Chess King does NOT fill up lessons with weak examples! Chess King products have the highest quality lessons and the explanations are provided in comprehensive excellent English! I highly recommend Chess King for beginners, and club players through master level players who are looking to improve their chess performance! The absolute BEST chess learning product I own! Nothing else comes close in sheer volume, breath of scope AND the high quality of materials!

I am a longtime beginner. I have read books by Bobby Fischer on the approach to chess from a beginners perspective, which assigned the numerical values to the pieces. Pawn being lowest & Queen the highest. His attack strategy was capturing higher value pieces while sacrificing lower value pieces with the ultimate goal of placing a king in check that he cannot escape from ( checkmate). These exercises do little to teach one chess strategies because they do not explain these strategies. They simply tell you that it’s your move and what they want you to aaccomplish. So you make a wrong move say in the strategy of playing for advantage; all of these arrows appear( supposedly to guide your movement) but when you follow the arrows you are told that is an erroneous move! What’s the reasoning with the arrows then? It’s very confusing and frustrating. So then you guess, but invariably are wrong with your guess. Finally it shows the move you should have made, but there is no reason or explanation given other than the history of that particular maneuver in a match at some time in the history of match play! It might be elegant but you don’t ever understand how it came about? Maybe you should quit with the arrows and guide better!

This is the core app which acts as a hub of sorts for other courses which can be purchased separately and accessed within this core app. There is an absolute TON of content available that works within this hub, probably about a hundred courses or so as I write this review. These are not overly-simplified courses either, they are quite deep and each one provides many hours of content and study, as well as puzzles galore. What I like is that the engine does a good job walking you through complex puzzles, at first giving subtle hints and eventually making the moves for you. Your rating will drop if you completely mess up the puzzles, but at least you will learn from it. Each course costs between about $4 to $8 for the full versions but they are definitely worth it, I’m surprised how deep they go, and they are very “replayable” so you won’t just burn through a particular course and be done with it. Everything is covered, from absolute beginner courses aimed at people who have never touched the game, all the way up to grandmasters. My biggest complaint is that the UI needs a serious facelift. It was quite confusing for me at first to navigate around and it looks somewhat unappealing though functional (once you get it). I highly recommend purchasing the courses from within the app itself and not through the Apple App Store because linking them in can be confusing. That one negative aside, if you are looking for the ultimate chess learning tool then this is the place to start, but be warned, it’s addicting buying courses so your wallet may not like it (but it’s worth it).