Chess Program Review Archive

Chess Tactics for Beginners is a windows tutorial program from the makers of Chess Assistant. The program is intended for players with ELO<1600, and I believe this assessment is quite accurate. In plain English, this program is useful to the greater majority of people that play in USCF rated tournaments in the US.

The quiz positions in the program are taken from the book The Manual of Chess Combinations, by Sergey Ivaschenko. I do not have this book (it has only recently been published in the US) so I cannot comment on the overlap.

Like a tactics book, this program presents one exercise after another (about 1300 In all). The program also automatically keeps track of missed exercises, and presents an estimated ELO rating based on exercises missed and completed successfully.

Quiz positions are accessed in either test or practice mode. There is not too much difference between these two modes – i.e. they access the same exercises. However in test mode, use of chess engines is not permitted, and exercises can be randomized. All in all, the system is very similar to that used by CT-ART. The quiz positions are organized into five progressively harder stages:

• Stage 1: Mate in one with the various pieces (about 120 exercises)
  
• Stage 2: Mate in one, drawing, piece sacrifices, winning material, mate in two with double check (about 300 exercises)
  
• Stage 3: Mate in two, winning material by piece (about 300 exercises)
  
• Stage 4: Winning material by piece, draw, and free-for-all (about 300 exercises)
  
• Stage 5: No subcategories (about 300 exercises)
  

Help is provided by a series of arrows and colored squares drawn on the board, and is only provided after the user misses the key move the first time. Subsequent mistakes result in the program showing which piece to move. This method is the same as that used in CT-ART, with the exception that there are no small pop-up 5x5 boards. These are really not needed here, because the exercises start out at an easy enough level.

Thorough statistics are available on all the exercises, and are indexed to individual users – so you can have multiple people using the program, and it will keep track of the results for each person.

Regular readers of this site have probably guessed that I like the tutorial programs written by Chess Assistant, and this one is no exception. I found one omission that I would probably address in future versions – I would add some more tactical themes to be used when accessing the exercises (like double attack, pinning, etc.). Overall though, the program contains a large number of very instructive tactical exercises, and many club players would probably benefit from careful study of them.

Copy protection: CD-based refueling

Strengths:

1. A built in chess engine (Dragon) is included. You can use it for trying out alternative solutions.
2. You can call other chess-playing programs with it's EPD export facility. These include: Hiarcs, Rebel, Genius, MChess Pro, or any program that supports EPD import.
3. The program is good for coaches - it keeps track of results (time and score) on every test position under a student name
4. The program has a sort of 'rate-my-play' feature that can be used to evaluate your progress. It provides a bar graph of your estimated ELO based on your success or failure on exercises.
5. Help is given in progressive increments - i.e. the first mistake pops up an indication of the geometrical pattern involved in the combination, important squares, etc. More specific hints are given when more mistakes are made, including the piece to move.
6. Multiple languages are supported: Dutch, English, Italian, Spanish, and German
7. Key variations are presented in a window to the right of the board. Clicking on a move in a particular variation allows you to navigate through the problem. This is nice for reviewing a variation you had some trouble with earlier in the problem.
8. A test mode allows you to review material you have already covered - you can do this for problems you did well or poorly on, or you can be tested on new material, easy or hard problems, etc.
9. The program has many possible ways of presenting material for tests. Key patterns are presented from both the white and black sides (i.e. mirror imaged). This aids calculation ability.

Weaknesses

1. There could be more tactical themes used to access the exercises.

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