CT-ART 4.0 (Chess Tactics)

Makes you solve side lines and forces you to prove you understand the tactics. Very high level stuff and starts out small so you can see the patterns build. Also has a computer so you can understand how the rest of the game would play out, and prompts with hints when you get a puzzle wrong so that you can start to see the solution but still solve it yourself. Really good tactics app, probably the best I’ve ever used.

This app is exactly what I needed: something to wean me off of mindless tactical trainers like chess tempo which, although challenging, don’t target specific motifs. The human mind needs patterns to remember things, and this app is great at doing that. Also, the hint after two mistakes which highlights various relevant pieces has an added bonus of forcing you to figure out the important arrangement of pieces, similar to some books which repeat a tactic with the same pieces but adding others to complicate things. Hoping to use the woodpecker method with this set of puzzles. Cheers!

They recently disabled the automatic playback of refutations to bad moves. I don’t like this. Being able to see these is useful, otherwise it’s hard to see just why a move is wrong. There’s no obvious way to enable auto-playback again. There *is* a way, which is to enable auto-hints, but this isn’t obvious at all and—for me, worse yet—makes the problems too easy. It forces you to get hints when you’re struggling with a problem, even to the point of having moves made for you by the app. I want to see refutations because seeing them helps me learn what I’m doing wrong, but I don’t want hints because they make problems too easy. I’d rather struggle for several minutes and figure it out myself. I hope they fix this soon-ish. All it would take is adding a little toggle button to the settings menu.