If you understand how the site works you’ll be aware that only one of those moves works, so your job is to find out which and why. Would you call this a pin or a skewer? But should you choose Qg5 or Qh4? You should see at a glance that you can attack both black rooks.

This position, with White to play, would be perfect for the Heads or Tails chapter of my book. your web browser and/or your host do not support iframes as required to display the chessboard alternatively your wordpress theme might suppress the html iframe tag from articles or excerpts Of course many games are also won by unsound sacrifices. Many of the puzzles are defensive and involve refuting your opponent’s unsound combinations: again confirming my experience that, at this level, more games are lost by unsound sacrifices than won by sound sacrifices. They’re very different from what you see in most tactics books, but quite similar to those in Chess Puzzles for Heroes (of which more later) and it very much confirms my views that excelling at tactics is about seeing tactical points rather than playing brilliant sacrifices, about developing breadth of vision rather than depth of vision. (There seem to be a couple of design faults here: you can click to see the game before solving the puzzle, although I’m not sure why you’d want to cheat in this way, and sometimes the next puzzle comes from the same game, in which case you may already have seen the answer.) You can also click to see the complete game and find out how the position came about. The puzzles I’m offered are usually from games between players rated 1800-2300: if you’re rating is higher or lower you’ll get harder or easier positions.Īfter solving the puzzles you can switch on Stockfish, which is especially helpful if you made a mistake. You gain rating points for a complete and correct solution and lose points for every position you fail to solve. There’s no clock so you can spend as long as you like on each position. In each position you have to find a series of ‘only moves’ which will result in a winning advantage. These puzzles, and there must be hundreds of thousands of them, are computer generated, presumably by running blunder checks on games played on the site.

The answer is very simple: I’ve become addicted to the lichess puzzle page. You might have been wondering why I’ve been so quiet recently.

Chess tactics trainer free