u/LoLGhMaster

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

Hey folks,

ChessWoodie just launched on Product Hunt today. If you've got a couple of minutes, an upvote would mean a lot. And if you can leave a quick comment about what's actually worked for you in your training, that helps even more, it's the kind of thing that convinces other people to give it a shot.

Link: https://www.producthunt.com/products/chesswoodie

One of the best ways to improve at chess is analyzing your own games and learning from your mistakes. This new feature helps you do exactly that. With the Learn From Your Games module, you can import your latest games from Lichess, and we analyze them in the background to extract the tactics you missed.

How it works

Connect your Lichess account, hit import, and we analyze your recent games with Stockfish looking for two kinds of moments:

• Tactics you missed. Positions where you had a winning shot and played something else instead.
• Tactics you handed your opponent. Positions where you were the one who gave up the advantage, presented back to you solved from your opponent's side of the board, so you learn to spot the danger next time you're on the giving end.

Each one becomes a puzzle you can add to your personal spaced-repetition review queue.

A few important things:

• You need to connect your Lichess account first. That's how we pull your games. If you haven't linked it yet, you'll be prompted from the "My Games" page.
• This takes real computing time. A full analysis run can take 10+ minutes since we're running an actual chess engine over every move of every game. You don't need to sit and wait. Trigger the import and go do a normal training session; it runs in the background and the puzzles will be there when it's done.
• These puzzles are yours alone. They're never added to the shared ChessWoodie puzzle pool. Only you can see and train on tactics extracted from your games.
• Every puzzle links straight back to the exact moment in the actual Lichess game, so you can pop over and re-explore the position, the clock, the rest of the game, whatever context you want.
• Availability: free tier gets one import a month; Premium is unlimited for now (we're watching the compute cost on this closely, so that may change down the line, but existing imports and puzzles are yours to keep either way).

This is v1. Help us make it better.

The extraction logic is automated, and like any engine-driven system it won't be perfect on day one. If a puzzle looks off (ambiguous, not actually decisive, wrong solution, whatever), please use the flag/report button on it and tell us why. That feedback goes straight into improving the detection logic. We'd genuinely rather hear "this one's wrong" from you than have it sit there being annoying.

Give it a try and let me know what you find.

The beauty of pattern recognition is not just realizing the opportunities but also creating them.
In this fairly equal position (white has slight advantage), you start to see the fork with the knight, the skewer on D-file, the sacrifice on e6 and suddenly you realize that the only missing piece is the bishop and you put it on h3 preparing a devastating attack.

I think if I were not practicing pattern recognition so much, I would probably play a calmer move like Rd2 to double up my rooks on d file, but the Bh3 started a sequence quickly winning the game.

Published a new article on the blog:
https://www.chesswoodie.com/blog/chess-thought-process/

You're following your own plan, everything looks fine, and then your opponent plays something you never considered. A fork, and a piece is gone. Most of the time the move wasn't even hard to spot, you were just focused on your ideas and plans and not theirs. This article lays out a simple thinking routine you can run on every move, so you catch your opponent's ideas before they catch you.

Main ideas covered:

• the fastest way to scan a position for danger (checks, captures, threats), and why you have to run it from your opponent's side, not just your own
• how to come up with a few candidate moves before you start calculating, instead of locking onto the first idea you see
• why it's worth checking the move you're about to play against your opponent's best response, instead of playing it and hoping it works

The article ends with a six-step version of the whole routine you can run in your next slow game, plus the common ways it falls apart (thinking forever and then playing on impulse, or quietly dropping the routine the moment you feel like you're winning).

The routine feels slow at first, but it gets faster the more patterns you know on sight. When you've seen a threat enough times, you notice it right away instead of hunting for it, and that recognition is the part ChessWoodie is built to train.

What does your move routine look like right now? Do you go through the same checks every move, or only when the position looks sharp?

Magnus had a tough day today at FIDE World Rapid & Blitz Team Chess Championships 2026. Losing rounds 6 and 7 to Arjun and Shant respectively. Can you spot the winning continuations after those blunders?

If added to ChessWoodie, what do you think would be a proper difficulty for those puzzles?

The Woodpecker Method rewards showing up regularly. The more consistently you train, the faster the patterns start to stick. The hard part isn't the training itself, it's that life gets busy and a session quietly slips off your radar. Push notifications are live now to help with that.

There are three types, each for a different situation rather than one generic daily ping.

How it works

• Daily reminder: if you haven't trained yet and your chosen time comes around, you get a reminder. You set the time yourself in profile settings.
• Streak alert: if it's past 8pm and your streak is still active but you haven't trained, you get a notification that the day is almost over. For the days when you meant to do it earlier but got busy.
• Come-back nudge: if you haven't trained in a week, you get one message letting you know your spot is still there. No pressure, just a reminder.

You can turn each one on or off in profile settings. When you save, if notifications aren't enabled on your device yet, your OS will ask you to allow them.

Android app already supports the push notifications.

No iOS app yet, but you can still get push notifications on iOS by adding ChessWoodie to your home screen as a PWA. Here's a short video showing how.

Let me know how it feels after a few days. Curious if the timing works or if something's off.

Published a new article on the blog:
https://www.chesswoodie.com/blog/spaced-repetition-chess-tactics/

Main ideas covered:

• why not all patterns need the same amount of attention, and where fixed-set repetition has a blind spot
• how spaced repetition fills that gap by routing the hardest patterns back to you before they fade, using slow solves as a signal alongside wrong answers
• how the two systems work together in practice, and why review should come before your puzzle session, not after

Also covers the SM-2 algorithm behind the scheduling, and why five to ten minutes of daily review is enough if you're consistent.

ChessWoodie now handles both sides automatically: full Woodpecker cycle tracking with PPM measurement, and spaced review scheduling for the patterns that keep slipping.

What's your current review habit? Do you revisit puzzles you've gotten wrong, or move on to new ones each session?

One of the best things you can do after completing a training session is reviewing the puzzles you got wrong. With the Woodpecker Method you will come across those puzzles again in later cycles, but the puzzles you got wrong or spent too much time figuring out deserve more attention than the rest. This new review module is here to address exactly that.

Here's how it works

After you finish a training session, any puzzle you got wrong gets added to your personal review queue, due tomorrow. The next time you open ChessWoodie, you'll see a badge in the top navigation with your due count. Mistakes can be reviewed in small batches of up to 10.

The more you struggle with a puzzle, the more often it comes back. Get it right consistently and it gradually fades out. The goal is to keep reinforcing the patterns you're missing until they're locked in for good.

Premium: slow solves get queued too

If you solved a puzzle correctly but it took too long for its difficulty level, that puzzle also goes into your review queue. Getting the right answer eventually isn't the goal - instant pattern recognition is. A slow solve is a sign the pattern isn't automatic yet.

Really happy with how this one turned out. Give it a few days and let me know how it feels!