Chess Tools

Most of this site is written explanation, and explanation only gets you so far. At some point you want to look at a position rather than read about one, quiz yourself instead of re-reading a page you've already seen, or set up a board yourself instead of studying someone else's example. These four tools exist for exactly that — small, focused, and built to run entirely in your browser, with nothing to install and no account to create anywhere on this site.

They're built deliberately narrow. None of them evaluates a position, suggests a best move, or analyzes a game — that's a different kind of product with a different kind of cost, and it isn't what this site is for. What they do instead is make the explanations elsewhere on the site concrete, and give you a way to practice specific, nameable skills without needing an opponent, a club, or another person to check your work.

If you want to see a position rather than picture it

The step-through board is the component threaded through most opening, tactic, and endgame pages: prev and next controls that walk you across a worked example piece by piece, each step paired with a short line on why that particular move matters. It's the right tool when you're reading a page and the description of a position isn't landing — watching the pieces actually change usually clears it up faster than rereading the sentence.

If you don't know what to play and want a starting point

The opening picker quiz asks a short set of questions about how you like to play — sharp and tactical or slow and positional, how much memorized theory you're willing to carry — and points you toward openings for both White and Black that suit the answers. It's aimed squarely at someone who's read part of the openings section and still doesn't know where to actually start, rather than someone who already has a repertoire and is refining it.

If reading notation is still slow going

The notation trainer drills the skill covered on chess notation explained until it stops requiring conscious translation: it shows you a move written in algebraic notation and asks you to find it on the board, and the reverse — a square or a move on the board that you name in notation. Your progress is tracked locally in your own browser, so you can pick up a practice session where you left off without creating an account anywhere.

If you want to build a position, not just view one

The board editor is the one tool here built for input rather than output: place any pieces anywhere on an empty or standard board, then share the exact position with anyone else through a single URL that encodes it. It's the natural tool for setting up a puzzle you saw somewhere else, recreating a position from a game you just played to think about it further, or testing a 'what if' idea that doesn't correspond to any real opening or endgame in the rest of the site.

The difference between the two quizzing tools

The opening picker quiz and the notation trainer both ask you questions, but they're meant to be used in almost opposite ways, and confusing the two wastes your time either way. The opening picker quiz is a one-time — or occasional — decision tool: you answer a handful of questions about your playing style once, get a recommendation, and then go spend weeks or months actually studying that opening on the rest of the site. Retaking it every day wouldn't tell you anything new, because your playing style doesn't change that fast. The notation trainer is the opposite: it's built for repeated, short sessions, the same way flashcards are, because notation fluency comes specifically from repetition spaced out over time rather than from a single long session or a single correct answer.

Sharing a position with the board editor

The board editor's URL-based sharing exists because the alternative — describing a position in words, or attaching a screenshot — is worse for chess specifically. A position described in words is slow to reconstruct and easy to get subtly wrong; a screenshot can't be clicked back into an editable board on the other end. Encoding the position directly into the link means anyone you send it to sees the exact same setup instantly, on any device, without needing to already have an account here or install anything at all. That also makes it a reasonable way to save your own positions for later — bookmark the link the same way you'd bookmark any other page, rather than relying on the tool to remember anything about you between visits, which it deliberately doesn't do.

Why there's no engine here

It would be straightforward to bolt a position evaluator onto any of these and it's a deliberate choice not to. An evaluation number answers a narrow question — which move does a computer prefer right now — and it answers it without explaining why, which tends to replace your own judgment rather than sharpen it, especially for a player still building that judgment in the first place. These tools are built to support the explanations on the rest of the site, not to hand you an answer that skips past understanding the position yourself. If you're looking for engine analysis, that's a reasonable thing to want; it's just a different tool than the ones built here.

What clearing your browser data does to each one

Because nothing here is stored on a remote server, it's genuinely worth knowing what happens if you clear your browser's site data or switch to a different device entirely. The step-through board and the opening picker quiz lose nothing, because neither one keeps anything between visits — there's nothing to clear. The notation trainer is the one exception: its progress record lives entirely in that browser's local storage, so clearing site data or opening the trainer in a different browser genuinely starts your progress over from zero. The board editor sits in between — the editor itself remembers nothing, but any position you've already turned into a shared link keeps working regardless of what happens to your browser, because the position lives in the link itself rather than in storage tied to your device.

Which one to open first

If you're brand new to the game, start with the step-through board on any opening page rather than one of the standalone tool pages — it's most useful in context, next to the explanation it's illustrating. Once notation itself feels slow, that's the specific signal to switch over to the notation trainer for a focused session rather than continuing to puzzle it out passage by passage. The opening picker quiz is worth returning to any time your repertoire questions change, not just once — what suits you as a newer player often stops suiting you a year later, and there's no cost to retaking it. The board editor is the one most players reach for last, once they already have a specific position in mind rather than a general question to answer.

None of these four tools requires you to already know an opening, a tactic, or an endgame by name — but they're built to be used alongside the rest of the site, not instead of it, the same way a set of flashcards works better next to a textbook than in place of one. If you land on a tool page directly and want the explanation behind what you're practicing, the learn section and the tactics section are the two places most tool users end up next.