What it does, and why it works
25 things, and each one is here for a reason. The short version: an engine judges your moves, a coach explains them in words, and tomorrow’s training comes from today’s mistakes. Everything else exists to get you back tomorrow.
Get better
A chess engine judges every move you play, finds the mistakes you make more than once, and turns them into the training you do tomorrow. This is the part that actually moves your rating.
Stockfish analyses every game you finish, whether or not you ask.
You see exactly where the game turned, and the mistakes get mined into your plan automatically. Nothing is wasted — even a casual game makes tomorrow sharper.
The positions you got wrong come back as puzzles until you stop getting them wrong.
Generic puzzles train whatever they happen to cover. These train the specific thing costing you games.
A four-item scoresheet chosen from what you have been getting wrong.
Removes the hardest decision in self-study — what to work on today. Twenty minutes a day genuinely beats three hours on a Sunday.
Winning positions you must convert and drawn ones you must hold, against perfect defence.
Games are lost in endings more than openings. Here the defence never blunders, so a win you scrape is a win you earned.
Enter a whole winning line without touching a piece.
Visualisation is the muscle that separates 1200 from 1800, and it is the one nobody trains because it is uncomfortable.
One personal set of puzzles, re-solved in timed cycles, faster each round.
A method strong players use. Recognition beats calculation in a real game, and this is how recognition is built.
Thirty seconds naming squares, from either side of the board.
If you count "a, b, c, d" to find d4, that is working memory not spent on the position. It is why long calculations fall apart.
Your rating curve, a skill profile by motif, and a Monday summary of what you fixed and what is still bleeding.
Improvement is invisible week to week. Seeing "you have not hung a piece in a fortnight" is what keeps people going.
Import from Chess.com or Lichess; your rating here calibrates to your real one.
No guessing at your level and no starting from zero. Your actual losses become your actual training within a minute.
Keep coming back
Chess patterns stick through repetition, and repetition needs a reason. None of this is a slot machine — every streak, score and race exists to get you to twenty minutes tomorrow.
Eight phases, each with a rating target and a boss bot guarding the way out.
Turns "get better at chess" into a next step you can actually see. Beat the boss, take the promotion.
Opponents from complete beginner to well past club level, always available.
You never wait for a game, and you never get crushed by someone six hundred points stronger by accident.
Play a friend, race them through the same ten puzzles, or run a round robin for three to eight of you.
The thing that actually gets a fourteen-year-old to open a chess app is another fourteen-year-old.
One position a day, the same one for everybody.
Something to argue about. Everything else is tuned to your rating; this one is shared on purpose.
Three minutes, three strikes, one score.
A number to beat. Speed under pressure is its own skill, and it is the most replayable thing here.
An opt-in weekly board for XP, streaks, ratings and puzzle scores.
Resets every Monday, so nobody is permanently behind and this week always counts.
King of the Hill and Three-check in friend games.
Unrated and unreviewed — purely for the fun of it, which is a legitimate reason to open a chess app.
Every drill in one place, each with what it trains and when to pick it.
For the days you want to choose rather than follow the plan.
Understand the game
Drilling alone makes you faster at patterns without teaching you chess. Everything here explains, in plain words, why a move is good — and most of it is readable without an account.
Every verdict comes with a reason in plain language, from a coach you name yourself.
The engine says a move loses; the coach says why, and what to look for next time. That difference is the whole app.
Forty hands-on lessons, from your first tactic to grandmaster endgame theory.
Structure — and every position is checked against the engine and the endgame tablebase before it ships. Most self-taught players have holes they cannot see; a curriculum finds them.
Every rule of chess in five hands-on lessons, plus free courses on tactics and openings.
Start from genuinely nothing. No account needed, so you can send it to someone before they sign up.
What strong players actually played from any position, drawn from 252,000 master games.
The engine tells you what is best; this tells you what is normal. Both matter, and they are not the same question.
Drills a real repertoire — Italian and London as White, Caro-Kann and QGD as Black.
Varies its replies like a real opponent, so you learn the ideas rather than a move order.
A coach or parent follows your progress read-only, and can build annotated lessons you replay.
A real coach walks in already knowing what you have been getting wrong, instead of spending the first ten minutes finding out.
A plain-language glossary and the story of the game from chaturanga to today.
Chess is full of words nobody explains. Knowing what a "minority attack" is makes every annotation readable.
Photograph a position from a physical board and analyse it.
For studying at a real board, where most serious chess still happens.
No chat. Nobody can look you up.
There is no messaging anywhere in ChessIt and no way to browse other players — you play bots at any strength, or people you invited. It is why a nine-year-old is safe here, and why plenty of adults prefer it.
How it works →