Climbchess
What's confusing, broken, or missing? We read every message.
Bad day? Save your streak with the daily minimum.
20 minutes a day, prescribed by your tier and recent performance. Most progress in chess comes from consistency — daily practice beats marathon weekend sessions. Streak stays alive as long as you complete one daily session.
Chess looks infinite. It isn't — a few hundred fundamental patterns separate you from mastery. We test where you are, then drill the patterns you're weakest on with spaced repetition and subtractive scaffolding.
— chess patterns covering everything from piece values to grandmaster-level positional ideas. Backed by — tagged puzzles. Every drill is matched to your level, no wasted reps.
Peer-reviewed research shows competitive chess players peak around age 43, not 16 (Roring & Charness, 2007, Psychology and Aging). Documented adult improvers have reached Master starting from scratch in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. The "you're too old" myth is folk wisdom, not data. We won't promise you'll become a Grandmaster (the world's top ~2000 players, rated 2500+) — but Expert (2000) and Master (2200) are achievable with the right method.
We don't dump 300 concepts on you. You only need ~20 at your current level. Three layers: principles (how to think), named tactics (what every coach teaches), and position patterns (the recurring shapes that decide games at your tier). When you graduate, the curriculum rotates.
Watch a sequence of moves play out. The board resets — you replay the same sequence by dragging. No calculation. Pure visualization. Build the muscle in isolation.
Paste your Lichess username. We pull your last 20 games, find each loss, run Stockfish on every move, and identify the critical mistake that lost the game. Each mistake becomes a position in your review queue — drilled like normal training, but with the context of your real game.
Your top missed patterns from real games. Click to generate a 30-puzzle remedial pack targeting that pattern at your optimal difficulty.
Don't memorize moves — internalize the recurring shapes your opening produces. Pick an opening, see the patterns it most commonly creates (extracted from a chess AI's brain), then drill puzzles built on those patterns. That's how GMs actually understand openings.
Build your opening lines, drill them with spaced repetition. Most useful for 1700+ players where opening preparation matters.
Theoretical endgames are taught knowledge, not pattern recognition. Even Leela uses tablebases for these. Master ~30 essential positions and you have strong tournament-player endgame technique (roughly the level of a titled "FIDE Master" rated ~2300). Each one is drillable + walks you through the winning sequence.
Most players over-train what they're already good at and ignore their weaknesses. Your rating is bottlenecked by your weakest concept, not your strongest. This panel shows where you've been spending time vs where you actually need it.
A 30-day beginner journey is the right scale to see real movement. Show up, even briefly.
Accuracy × Speed × Depth per pattern. Your weakest axis is the one breaking your rating in real games.
Each pattern fits T(N) = T₁ × N−α. We classify whether you're learning normally, plateauing, mastering, or regressing — and recommend what to do.
Auto-advances when you hit 85% accuracy at your current depth's target rating. Steps back if you drop below 65%.
Shows how cluttered the board can be before you need pieces removed to see each pattern. Lower numbers = you spot the pattern even in messy positions (stronger recognition).
Glows the squares Leela's network is "looking at" for this puzzle's concept. Off = clean board for testing yourself.
Right/wrong feedback uses both colour and a ✓/✗ icon — colour is never the only signal. Switches palette to a colour-blind-safe set if you pick a CVD profile.
Uses your browser's built-in voices. Adds an auditory encoding pathway to strengthen pattern memory.
Runs synthetic users at fixed ratings (600–2800) through N training puzzles and verifies per-pattern Elo + speed Elo + tier classification converge correctly. Uses the same code paths as real training. Does NOT touch your real progress — runs against an isolated state copy.