Chess Tools

Boards, clocks and calculators for the parts of chess that are easier to try than to read about.

Rules

Chess Notation Trainer

Drill squares and moves until reading notation stops being work.

Chess Board Setup

Place every piece on a real board and have your setup checked square by square.

Analysis

Next Chess Move

Get the best move in any position, drawn on the board and explained in words.

Elo Calculator

Work out an expected score and a new rating, with every step written out.

Playing

Chess Timer

A two-player clock with increment, delay and every standard time control.

Chess Opening Explorer

Walk the opening tree move by move and see which openings you are still in.

Tools you can move pieces on

Almost everything written about the rules of chess is illustrated with a photograph. A photograph is a poor teacher for a game about movement: you cannot try the thing you just read, and you cannot find out whether you understood it.

These are tools you can actually use. Place a piece and something happens; tap a clock and it hands the move over; type a rating and the formula is written out rather than hidden. Where you get something wrong, you are told which square, or which rule, and why - in the language a coach would use rather than a red cross.

How to use these while you are learning

Try it from memory before you check. Being told you were wrong about d1 teaches far more than reading that the queen goes there.
When a tool names your mistake, say the rule back to yourself. "The queen goes on her own colour" is one sentence that fixes the setup forever.
Come back to the same tool a week later. Rules you can reconstruct from scratch are the ones you actually own.

What makes these different

Real interactive tools, not annotated photographs - you place the pieces, press the clock and type the numbers yourself.
Mistakes are named, not just marked. The tool tells you that your king and queen are swapped, or that the board is turned a quarter turn.
Drawn from the same board renderer the Coddy chess lessons use, so what you practise on is what you will play on.
No sign-up, no ads, and nothing you do leaves your browser.

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