Since September of 2021 I have been working on improving my chess game. I was initially introduced to chess in third grade, but never got to know the world of tournaments, puzzles, time controls, and online games. I spent the last few months getting a better understanding of the primary areas of focus for a chess beginner.
During my research I stumbled upon the #chesspunks community. This is a great community of like minded adult improvers. I’ve been really enjoying learning more about the learning strategies used by the founder of this community Neal Bruce.
Neal has committed to a ten year journey of self-improvement and uses flash cards that he creates by hand to study chess positions. I also have a fondness of learning from chess books, and wanted a similar approach without having to cut up my books, or find PDF’s to print and cut.
I have been working my way through a series of books known as the Chess Steps and was looking for a way to save the puzzles I missed and periodically review them. Fortunately, Chessable already has a tutorial on how to create your own course for just this type of use case.
The last problem was that I didn’t want to manually have to build up the board for each position that I missed. Enter chessvision.ai, this fantastic app let’s you take a picture of a chess position and allows you to export a FEN string encoding the position. You also can click the share icon on the iOS app and airdrop the FEN position to your computer.
So now my flow is that when I am checking my answers to a set of problems from my tactics books if I have one I have missed I take a picture with Chessvision and then send it to my computer. From there I add a new puzzle to my personal tactics course on Chessable. I then review these puzzles daily to help make sure I am improving on the positions that gave me trouble.
As always YMMV, but so far this seems like a nice way to build up a set of puzzles that are specific to the study material I am currently working through.
- Nick