CARLISLE CHESS CLUB

Tactical Trainer

The Carlisle Chess Club Tactical Trainer lets you develop your chess tactics skill by presenting you with chess positions to solve. You move the pieces on the board using your mouse, and the Web server lets you know whether you found the right solution. You don't have to compete, but for students who are motivated by a bit of competition, you can see how you are doing on the various problem sets compared to other members of the club.

There are several different sets of problems:

  • King and 2 Bishops vs King A classic endgame that isn't so easy.
  • King and Rook vs King A basic ending that comes up in real games all the time; so you have to know it.
  • Basic Endings. These are fundamental ending positions such as King plus Queen versus King. You must checkmate the other side, with the computer playing "D".
  • Mate in One. Here we present nearly 2000 positions where you can checkmate the other side in one move. These positions were extracted from actual tournament games. Most of them are relatively easy plant-your-Queen-next-to-the-opponent's-King style mates, but there are some hard ones.
  • Checkmate University. These are more than 500 tactical problems from the workbook by Michael Yip. These aren't too hard for beginners and each motif is repeated many times with slight variations. This repetition makes them a good start for someone new to chess tactics, but they might be a bit too repetitive for someone who is beyond the beginner stage..
  • Bain. These are about 350 tactics-training positions from the "Chess Tactics for Students" workbook by John Bain. Each problem appears twice. First they are presented grouped by tactical motif. Then they are all presented again at random. These problems are at a variety of levels ranging from very easy to quite difficult. Many of them are probably too hard for novices.
  • Win at Chess. These are positions from Fred Reinfeld's book. This set of problems has been used for many years to test computer chess programs, and many of them are challenging. These problems are here mainly for the entertainment of visitors to the site, such as the parents of the kids in the club. But there are certainly children in the Club who can solve many, if not most, of these problems.

The problems are restricted to members of the Carlisle Chess Club, except for the "Win at Chess" set.