u/LoLGhMaster

Source: Chess puzzle - Rating 1687 | ChessWoodie

Tomorrow we're releasing a new progression system for ChessWoodie.

You'll earn XP through your activity on ChessWoodie, level up over time, complete Weekly Goals, and compete with other players in Leagues.

Your previous ChessWoodie activity won't be lost either. Your starting Level and XP will take your existing training history into account.

The update is planned for Monday at 06:00 UTC. There will be a short maintenance period during the release and data migration, which may take up to 15–20 minutes.

Here's a first look at the new Home.

Full patch notes tomorrow once the update is live.

Launching Monday.

Learning has been rebuilt as Pattern Drills, with almost three times as many drills as before. The Courses page has been redesigned, and you can now sign in with email and Discord.

Pattern Drills

Learning is now called Pattern Drills, under Drills in the menu. The new name better describes what it is. A Drill is a puzzle set built around a single pattern. Every puzzle in it contains that pattern.

What's new:

• 70 drills, up from 24. The catalog now covers 28 patterns across three types: Tactical motifs, Endgames, and the new Checkmates type. There are drills for the classic mating patterns like Anastasia's mate, the Arabian mate and Boden's mate.
• Recommended for you. The Recommended view picks drills for the patterns you miss most in your Courses. If you're just starting out, you'll see a set of starter picks until you've done enough sessions. Recommendations are based on your training insights for the last 30 days.
• Find exactly what you want. The All view lets you filter by type, pattern, difficulty and status, and you can search and sort too.
• Every Beginner drill is free. Premium unlocks every drill at every difficulty.
• More free drills. 17 of the new drills are free, and Beginner Discovered attacks, Mate in 2, Rook endgames and Pawn endgames moved from Premium to free.
• Puzzle numbers adjusted. Intermediate drills now have 100 puzzles (up from 50) and Advanced drills 150 (up from 50). This only applies to drills you start from now on. Drills you've already started keep their size.

Redesigned Courses page

The Courses page has been rebuilt to show your progress more clearly and better align with current application style.

• The course you trained most recently is highlighted with a PPM (puzzle-per-minute) chart for each cycle. It shows your actual speed for the cycles you've done and a projection for the ones still ahead, so you can see the Woodpecker Method doing its job.
• Course cards are more compact, with a progress bar split into cycles so you can see precisely where you are at a glance.
• You can filter your courses, and finished courses you've put away are in an Archived view.
• Creating and editing a course, and viewing your results, all have a cleaner new layout.
• You can now revisit finished sessions from Course results on mobile too (previously available only on desktop view).

More ways to sign in

On top of Google and Lichess, you can now sign in with:

• Email. No password: we send you a 6-digit code and a sign-in link.
• Discord.

The sign-in page has been redesigned, too. You can add or remove sign-in methods and change your account email under Settings, Connections. If a new sign-in method uses an email that already belongs to an account, we'll ask before linking the two instead of doing it automatically. If you train as a guest, you'll now get a prompt after a session to save your progress to an account.

As always, feedback is welcome in the comments!

When players think about time management in chess, the question frequently comes down to pace.
How much time should you spend per move? But that question is misleading.

Time trouble is rarely a pacing problem. If you try to improve your pace, you might find yourself in even worse time trouble. Not thinking enough in critical moments puts you in a worse position, and a worse position has no cheap moves in it. That is where the clock actually goes.

The better question is when you should spend more time thinking. GM Aagaard sorts every decision into automatic, simple, critical and strategic, which is a useful frame. What I would add is that some moves deserve time not because the payoff is large, but because everything after them depends on the answer. Leaving your preparation and choosing a flank or a pawn break is the clearest example. Time spent there is not wasted, it is bought back over the next five to ten moves.

The article also covers playing when your opponent is the one short on time, which I do not see written about much. Short version: speeding up to pressure them just puts you in the same boat. You should instead use your time to set harder problems for them to solve.

Read more: https://www.chesswoodie.com/blog/time-management-in-chess/

link to the game: Yakubboev Nodirbek vs Nihal Sarin - 46th FIDE Chess Olympiad 2026 | Open - Chess.com

A couple of big changes in this patch. Puzzles From Your Games now supports Chess.com, and profile settings have been rebuilt from scratch.

Chess.com integration

If you play on Chess.com, ChessWoodie can now go through your games, find the tactical moments you missed, and turn them into puzzles for you to train on. Tactics from your own games are usually more relevant, since they contain patterns that are more likely to show up in your future games. They're the forks you didn't see and the combinations you let slip, and now you can train on them using spaced repetition to make the patterns stick.

Just connect your Chess.com account, and press the import button.

A few important things:

Lichess and Chess.com work side by side. If you play on both, you can link both. Each puzzle is tagged with the platform it came from.

Free members get one import per month, shared across both platforms. Premium members can import whenever they like.

Redesigned profile settings

Settings used to be a page with a bunch of input fields, hard to navigate. Now everything is organized into six sections: Profile, Training, Board & pieces, Notifications, Connections, and Data & privacy.

On desktop it's all on one page with a side menu to jump between sections. On mobile, each section opens on its own screen. Changes only apply when you hit Save.

This release adds a training activity chart to your home page and profile, so you can see your last 30 days of tactics training at a glance.

How it works

On desktop, it's a 30-day bar chart. On mobile, your home page shows a rolling 7-day row and your profile shows a 6-column calendar. Hover (or tap) any day to see the breakdown of training and mistake review puzzles you solved that day. Intensity coloring is calibrated against real puzzle-per-day data from the community, not arbitrary buckets. The brighter the column, the better you have trained that day.

A few important things:

Privacy is up to you. There's a toggle on your profile settings that controls whether visitors can see your activity chart (and the existing improvement-over-time chart) when they view your profile. It's on by default, so head to settings if you'd rather keep it private.

Also in this release

Profile pages got a rework: there's now one unified profile (whether it's you or someone else viewing it), so it's easier to share. It loads noticeably faster, and premium and founding member flairs now show up next to the name in profile.

Also a bunch of reliability work under the hood to ensure your training flow runs smoothly without interruptions.

I stole it and replaced with another unit. To my surprise it worked, however the game didn’t end cause it was not killed and I had to finish him the old fashioned way - by destroying its nexus

Nailed 6.5 star with 35 defiance like a boss in just 7 minutes!

Last time I posted about opening principles I mentioned that below 1500 you get more out of tactics, and that your opponent will deviate from your prep anyway. The obvious follow-up question is: fine, so when do openings actually start to matter?

That turned into this article.

The short version is that "openings" hides three different things. Learning the principles, picking a repertoire, and studying real theory are separate activities with completely different price tags. Naroditsky says start around 900 to 1000. Plenty of coaches say openings are a waste of time under 1800. Both are right, they just mean different things by the word.

The other thing I wanted to get right is that tactics never stop mattering. I play in the 2200 to 2400 range and my games are still decided by tactics. What changes as you climb is not that tactics fall away, it is that the opening stops giving you a playable position for free.

https://www.chesswoodie.com/blog/when-to-learn-chess-openings/

ChessWoodie is all about tactics training, so most of our articles are about tactics. But I keep running into posts on r/chess and r/chessbeginners asking which openings to learn.

My usual answer is that below 1500 you get far more out of training tactics than openings. Even if you know a few main lines, your opponent will deviate from those, and you are on your own anyway. Tactics turn up in basically every game you play.

That said, fundamentals are a different story, and opening principles in particular are worth learning early. They are the thing that tells you what to do once the memorized moves run out.

This article covers the opening principles with guidance on when to follow them and when to violate them. It is a bit on the longer side, but worth a read.

https://www.chesswoodie.com/blog/chess-opening-principles/

No mana used and no attacks. This Kata + Fiddle interaction was so satisfying.

Was playing Fiddle vs Zoe with Kata as support champ and came across this infinite interaction. Thought that was funny