Openings · Middlegames · Endgames
What you do not know is which of the ten thousand things to study next. ChessForge decides that for you, one step at a time, and every line in it was checked against Stockfish before it shipped.
Free, no card. Grandmaster $4.99 / month.
What is in it
Every line, branch, position and result below was checked against Stockfish before it shipped. Anything the engine disagreed with was dropped rather than published — 995 moves across the library, none of them wrong.
Fourteen openings, walked move by move with the reason sitting under each one. Then you play the same line back with no prompts, because recalling it is what makes it yours.
Then the part nobody covers: 252 replies for when he leaves the book, which is most games by move six. Every one has an answer and a reason for it.
Puzzles tell you a tactic exists before you look, which is the one thing a real game never does. Most positions contain nothing at all — and those are the ones that decide your games.
Forty-three positions verified to hold no tactic, each asking the same five questions in the same order, until you ask them without being prompted.
Before a single move, one question: can this be won at all? Getting that wrong is how won endings get drawn and drawn ones get resigned, and it is the judgement the whole endgame turns on.
Then you play it out against the best defence there is, with the method arriving a step at a time as you carry it out.
How it works
Choosing what to study well requires knowing what you are missing, which is the thing you do not have yet. So it is not a library you browse. Open any section and one step is already waiting, with one button under it.
Walk the line, then play it from memory, then handle him leaving the book. That order is the argument: you cannot recall what you have not seen, and off-book is meaningless until the book is automatic.
One step, one filled button. Everything else on the screen is quieter on purpose, so there is never a moment of deciding between six things that all look equally important.
Finish it and the following step is already there — and when a tab runs out, it hands you to the one that has not. You are never returned to a menu.
Try it here
This is how every endgame in the app opens. Not “find the move” — something harder, and the thing that actually decides these games.
You are White. It is your move.
Not “can I find a good move”. Can this position be won at all, against the best defence there is?
The method: Your king goes first, in front of the pawn. Push the pawn first and you draw a game you were winning.
Verified at depth before it shipped: this one is a win in 13. Twenty-four endings in the app, and every result checked the same way.
Why it sticks
The answer to “I used it once and then it was redundant”. Everything you finish returns on a schedule, and it arrives at the point you are about to lose it — which is the moment practising it is worth anything at all.
One day, three, a week, then longer. Get one wrong and it drops back two steps, not to zero — landing on nothing is discouraging, and it is not what the research says either.
An item is served when it is nearly forgotten, not while it is still fresh. Easy recall builds nothing. That difficulty is not a side effect of the method; it is the method.
Every move, branch, position and endgame result was verified against Stockfish before it shipped. The gate refused a lot of our own content, and that content is not in the app.
Pricing
Grandmaster takes the limits off. Nothing here is a trial-shaped version of the product.
A card is taken up front. Cancel any time before day three and you are charged nothing.
Questions
You open it and it tells you the next step. Walk an opening line, play it back from memory, handle the replies that leave the book, read a middlegame position, or play an endgame out against best defence. There is no menu to choose from unless you go looking for one.
Puzzles tell you a tactic exists before you look, which is the one thing a real game never does. Most positions contain nothing at all, and the skill that decides those games is knowing what to do when there is nothing to find. That is what the middlegame section trains, on positions verified to hold no tactic.
Every move, branch, position and endgame result was checked against Stockfish before it shipped, and anything the engine disagreed with was dropped rather than published. 995 moves across the whole library, none of them wrong. The checking refused a lot of our own writing, and that writing is not in the app.
That is what the review schedule is for. Everything you finish comes back at one day, three, a week, then longer — arriving at the point you are about to forget it, which is when practising it is worth anything. Get one wrong and it drops back two steps rather than to zero.
Roughly 300 to 1400. It is built for the point where you know how the pieces move but not what to do with them, and where every game ends the same three ways.
Yes. All three sections, the full board, and your progress follows the account rather than the device.
Yes, from your account, through Stripe's own billing portal. Access continues to the end of the period you have already paid for.
Or it could be another one you forget by Tuesday.
Start training →ChessForge is a chess coaching service. Use it lawfully and do not abuse, scrape or resell it. Subscriptions renew monthly until cancelled; cancel any time from your account menu and access continues to the end of the period already paid for. Provided as is, without warranty. A plain-language summary, not legal advice.
We store your account, the games you play here, and the games you choose to import. Payments go through Stripe; we never see your card. We do not sell your data. Marketing email is opt-in and every message carries a one-click unsubscribe. Ask for deletion any time. A plain-language summary, not legal advice.
The pieces are the work of Colin M.L. Burnett, used under the
3-clause BSD Licence. The originals are on Wikimedia Commons under a choice of licences
(GFDL 1.2+, CC BY-SA 3.0, GPL v2/v3 and 3-clause BSD); ChessForge uses them under the BSD
terms. The only change is a viewBox so the artwork scales. The full licence ships
at pieces/LICENSE.txt.
Analysis is by Stockfish, free software under the GNU GPL v3, running as a separate program on our server.
chess.js (BSD) in the browser, python-chess (GPL v3) on the server.
