Chessable is better than I thought

My recent experience

Call me a slowpoke, but I think only now I start to appreciate the real merits of Chessable.

The thing is that I mainly used it not for its main selling point — openings study — but rather for reading and memorising books, tactical puzzles or problem collections. I studied courses like “100 Endgames You Must Know”, “1001 Endgame Exercises for Beginners” (apparently I like courses with numbers in their title!), “The Checkmate Patterns Manual” and even the first book of Yusupov’s course (to accompany my physical book studies). And also I was mainly using it as a phone app on a relatively small screen of my phone.

For puzzle solving it’s debatable if it’s the best use of practice time to keep solving the same problem again and again. Yes, it might be useful for checkmate patterns, but potentially it’s even more useful to be exposed to more puzzles rather than seeing the same one over and over again in a spaced repetition manner.

And about endgame courses — to be honest, the chance of meeting and applying most of those theoretical positions from “100 Endgames You Must Know” in a real game is very slim — it’s good to read about them once, and maybe practise some techniques against the engine — but I’m not fully convinced that it’s a good idea to memorise those positions one by one with spaced repetition.

And now I finally got to study an opening course (on Anti-Sicilians by Daniel King — in my quest to start playing more Sicilian as Black). Also I started using Chessable mostly from my laptop where you have a bigger screen and a better layout and it doesn’t feel as sluggish as on the phone. The course is immediately applicable to my games: I’ve already got a line covered in a shorter version of that course in my second Sicilian game ever! So I am feeling that it’s a useful study and lines and ideas are worth memorising.

I quite like the introduction of priority lines that tell you which lines are actually worth memorizing. To start with I can just focus on those: you can either use priority lines marked by the author of the course, or by “the algorithm”, based on their frequency in real games.

I am also not repeating my previous mistake of studying too many variations quickly and then being swamped with reviews for the next week. I am planning to study variations that I am really interested in (or consider difficult to play without guidance) and the ones that I had encountered in my games and faced difficulties.

Another feature that I recently discovered is that you can use an opening explorer specifically tailored for a particular course and see what moves are covered and their win rates. Also it’s possible to search for courses that are covering a particular opening position, which is also nice (and of course leads to Chessable selling more of those courses! :)

And finally, if I compare a Chessable course against a statistical based approach (just choosing the moves that perform better) and using ChessBook, the courses are easier to memorise because their authors give you ideas and explanations. Not for every move, but still. And if you create your repertoire yourself and add a well performing move, then you need to dig into it yourself as to why it’s so good and what to play next (or look in opening books or courses for explanation).

What are other less known Chessable features that you like?