Show HN: BraiMax Chess – Bootstrapped personalized chess training Web App MVP
chess.braimax.com
chess.braimax.com
Background story: during lockdown I decided to try and improve at chess, which I was playing online a lot. Bought a few books, tried all the websites and apps I found. This serious study helped a lot in understanding the game better, but didn’t improve my results as much as I hoped. It also was very hard work, and after a few months I stopped having the motivation to continue.
Around that time I discovered Puzzle Rush on chess.com; that one was the most enjoyable chess-related thing I could do besides playing games, and it helped with tactics, but I soon plateaued - until I thought about combining that with spaced repetitions. I would manually review the puzzles I had failed, and add them to a rudimentary spaced repetitions system I had hacked together. It was a bit of work, but still enjoyable enough to stick to it; that’s when I started getting noticeably better and better, making fewer blunders, and climbing the rating.
Late last year I decided to take some time off after leaving my last job; during the break I felt an itch and decided to create a website which would allow anybody to use the same technique I described above, but in a much easier/integrated way. After three months of full time work on it, it’s ready!
I’ve also got ideas which I think will make it much better, finding out where each user needs to improve the most and finding a suitable training program, almost like a digital chess coach - but to be honest I now need to find how to finance this evolution; the most likely scenario right now is that I’ll do that by finding a part time contracting job. By the way, if you’re looking for a very professional and highly productive full stack Rails/React remote developer, feel free to contact me, data is on my profile.
PS: I also launched on product hunt today: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/braimax-chess