I’ve been struggling with visualization for years, and find chess books notation difficult to follow without an actual board next to me. I was sent a beta version to try out and love it! Spend some time with the training levels, confirm and track your progress with the rapid challenge (which gets super hard after the first few) and work on my position recall a lot. It really makes you think of the whole board at all times because my eyes naturally go to the pieces and squares they are on which has reduced my hanging pieces because I tend to look at the whole board now, not just my side. I’m playing around with the blindfold game but still lose the board after about ten full moves, but I’m getting better all the time. The BIGGEST change though, is now when I play online, I call out each piece and square as I play, like Queen to C5, and when I’m going through my progressions and candidate moves, I call out what I’m thinking. My goal is to play a full blindfold game within a year!

I coach players who know the ideas and still stall because they can’t hold the position. They flip back to the diagram, set up a board, or lose the line two moves in. BoardWithin is the drill I wanted for that.It doesn’t pretend to be an engine or a tactics dump. It builds the internal board in order: coordinates, movement, square and piece recall, then calculation and mate with the pieces hidden. Labels come off as the map gets stronger, which is the right progression. Voice answers are useful in a lesson — the student has to picture the square or the move and say it, not tap around until something sticks.Blindfold Game is the checkpoint I care about. If they can follow a legal game from the notation and only reveal the board when the picture breaks, the training is transferring. Daily sessions and spaced mistake review mean I can assign it between lessons without building a worksheet.I still do the chess. This handles the part most apps skip: making the board stay in their head.

Got this app to help me play chess in my head. What a great trainer app! A huge plus if you’re learning how to play visually!

I just picked up chess again after a many year hiatus. Sitting around the 1000 ELO level and not really making any headway. I watch a bunch of YouTube tutorials but it’s just good players crushing guys like me with no real explanation of why they do what they do. But it is impressive when they call out all the squares as they calculate their moves. books are really slow for me because they are all notation and unless I’m sitting at an actual chessboard I lose the board after a few moves. This app is changing that fast. All the training levels, rapid challenge with voice commands (awesome feature), position recall levels, and blindfold game (super challenging) are all helping my viz skills tremendously.