Show HN: A chess middlegame trainer so I can stop blundering | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A chess middlegame trainer so I can stop blundering

dontblunder.com

5 pointsaaronpierron5 comments

Normal chess puzzles teach you tactics, but no matter how many I do, I still make bad moves.

I made a site that rates every move in a position with Stockfish (a chess engine, stronger than every human) to give you feedback. Hopefully doing enough of these will reduce the likelihood of catastrophic blunders in real games.

Still a work in progress, and more game modes to come, but hopefully it's fun for any chess players out there. Feel free to ask me questions and I'll reply in the comments.

This summer I picked up Frank Erwich's two books (The 100 Tactical Patterns Yo Must Know). This is a study book and a work book. I usually get lost in chess books (expert rated) but I found this book really well worth the time to walk thru mostly middle game patterns.

This is great! How do you design the puzzles and score the moves?

If it was me I would score the move by the change in stockfish, before and after.

Good question! I used an open chess database of a few million games, then filtered for master level play with both players >2000 elo. These get stripped for middle game positions, so after move ~12 and while there’s enough material left on the board. Stockfish is then used with a high multi-pv to calculate move quality for all available moves.

Stockfish is run in two passes, one fast and one slow. The fast one gets rid of positions unlikely to make good puzzles (only one good move, one side clearly winning, etc.) while the slow one calculates move quality more accurately. Moves are rated relative to the best move in the position, with loss scored in centipawns (1/100th of a pawn). So, losing a pawn for nothing would be ~100 centipawns of loss. Anything over 300 centipawns lost is a blunder, and all blunder moves are scored equally bad.

Each puzzle takes a strong computer ~10 seconds to generate, but I managed to compile about 30,000 for the site. I plan to add more in the future for specific players/tournaments/openings!

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