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Comment by telesilla | Hacker News Reader

This absolutely rekindled my interest. I used to play as a young girl (pre-teen) and enjoyed it but as I got older didn't feel welcome in the chess club. It's nice how they show on TV that girls who wanted it just got in there and be involved but the reality was not as easy.. (hopefully it's easier now, the 80s was not kind to girls with a nerdish bent).

I've started reading chess openings and tactics as a way to send me to sleep, on one of those chess sites that sets up a play for you. I don't think I'll ever play chess again - time is limited and I don't think anyone would suffer playing with me given what I've forgotten - but I'm enjoying learning strategies again. It's great stuff for the brain.

I've put the Chess Tactics site on my weekend-lazy-reading list. Who knows, maybe I find my way back to playing games again.

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Try chess.com or lichess.org! You're automatically matched with someone of your skill level, and can play games from 1 to 10 minutes (each).

I can also vouch for lichess.org

It's free software (https://github.com/lichess-org), and you only need web browser to play [1]. Even Magnus Carlsen and many other top Grandmasters play there.

As for cheating, all games are checked for computer play, so even if you can occasionally lose a game or two from a cheater, he will be caught, and you will get back your rating points (if you care).

[1] Dunno what they are using for latency adjustments on lichess, but it seems to work fine. No external software necessary, unlike chess servers of yore: https://www.freechess.org/Help/HelpFiles/timeseal.html

I highly recommend Chess Tempo for tactics training. A large database of problems drawn from grandmaster games, insightful user commentary per problem, and a full classification of each problem by the type of tactic e.g. attraction.

chesstempo is neat because they have ELO-like ratings for tactics puzzles. It's the first place I saw such a thing.

Alot of those puzzles are damn hard, ELO ratings there are legitimate.

I feel that chess Tempo has really given me tools to recognize recurring tactical motifs in actual play.

There's a pretty good Stockfish app available for free

How realistic are the various apps at simulating, say, a 1200-ranked human player?

I'd love at app that really plays at my skill level, but my experience with older software was that the computer "dumbed itself down" simply by playing completely silly moves at times. (Of course, I played silly moves as well, so maybe it was accurate... But it didn't feel that way.)

Stockfish can play a pretty convincing ~1200-1400uscf game. (At least for that rating range 30 years ago.) It won't start making egregiously dumb moves until it's in the "If I were a person I'd resign, but I'm a computer so here take all of my material before you checkmate me" phase, though many of its opening choices are obviously third- or fourth-best.

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