Seven tactic categories. Four timer settings. 110+ puzzles. Pick what you want to drill, press Start, hold your streak.
A single miss ends the run — try again.
Most tactical mistakes in real games happen at depth one. A piece hangs, a back-rank mate is on the board, a knight fork is one hop away — and the player misses it not because the calculation was hard, but because the eye did not see it. Long puzzle sets train calculation; fast one-move sets train the eye. Both matter, but the second is usually what is missing in an amateur's game.
This drill rehearses the seven canonical one-move motifs: mate (in one or in two), capturing a hanging piece, fork, double attack, pin, skewer, and discovered (check or attack). At the 3-second setting the move is either visible or it is not — no time to reason, only to see. At the 5- and 10-second settings there is room to verify before clicking. At the 30-second Practice setting the timer effectively gets out of the way and the focus shifts to learning the patterns. The transfer is to blitz, bullet, and the early-clock scan in classical games — repeated short bursts of this kind of drill measurably reduce one-move blunders. The reveal-on-miss is the part that turns the streak from a punishment into a lesson: every wrong move teaches one new pattern.
Pick the timer that matches what you are actually doing. If you are drilling for blitz, run 3-second All to force reflex play. If you are learning a motif you have not internalized yet, run 30-second Practice on that single category and let the reveal-on-miss show you the right move every time you get one wrong — the pattern sticks faster from seeing the correct answer than from grinding under time pressure.
Use the per-category breakdown deliberately. A run of mixed-All ends with a small table showing your hit rate per motif — if Skewers were 0/3 while everything else was clean, that is the next category to drill solo. Three or four targeted Practice runs on the weak motif and the All breakdown usually evens out.
Play in short bursts. Five to ten streak attempts in a sitting is plenty — once concentration drops the streaks shorten and the drill stops being useful. Most players see real-game transfer after a week of one-minute warm-ups, not a single thirty-minute session.
Anyone past the absolute-beginner stage who wants to drill board vision and pattern recognition. Club players use it as a warm-up before a tournament round; improving players use it to sharpen the reflex of spotting hanging pieces and one-move mates; coaches assign it to students as a low-stress alternative to long puzzle sessions. The four timer options let beginners pick a forgiving 30-second Practice setting and experts pick a 3-second blitz pace — same puzzles, different focus.
Seven: Mate (one-move and two-move mates are pooled together), Hanging Piece, Fork, Double Attack, Pin, Skewer, and Discovered (check or attack). Each is a separate chip you can select to drill just that motif, or pick All to mix every category in the same shuffle.
Yes. Four chips: 3s, 5s, 10s, and 30s Practice. The selection takes effect on the next Start (or immediately on the idle preview); changing the chip mid-game does not interrupt the current puzzle. Most players settle into 5s after the first few runs.
The correct move is highlighted on the board for about a second and a half — the from-square in blue, the to-square in green — so you actually see what you should have played. Then the game-over screen appears with your final streak, your best ever, and a per-category accuracy breakdown of the run.
Symmetric training is on the roadmap, but a fixed orientation removes one variable from the visual pattern matching. Once your eye sees the silhouette of “white to move, white wins,” flipping it to play Black is a smaller jump than learning both at once. Train each side separately, then merge.
Yes. Once the queue is exhausted the puzzles reshuffle and continue, so very long streaks (forty or more) will see every puzzle at least twice. That is by design — pattern memory needs spaced repetition. With 110+ puzzles in the pool and most runs ending well before 40, repetition is rare.
Yes, in this browser. Best streak is stored in localStorage on your device. It is not transmitted to a server and will not transfer between browsers or devices unless you set them up separately.
The puzzles are hand-curated to have a single winning move (the rest of White's moves either do not win material, do not deliver mate, or lose to a refutation). If you find one that genuinely has two equivalent solutions, write in via the Contact page and the position will be revised.