"Dinos to the Slav"

Jeremy Silman does something for Chess Life Online that I'd been meaning to do: give an up-to-date review of iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch apps.

I'm a big fan of tChess Pro and I too have mellowed on ChessBase (which I may once have called "worst chess app ever," but now recommend).

Sorry for the relative silence: work (and playing chess!) get in the way of blogging sometimes.

Steve Jobs rules from the grave

I am extremely fond of Chess Flash: it's a great way to publish PGN on the Web.

But I've been putting off the completion of certain chess projects for the web because the iPad and iPhone don't naturally support Adobe Flash.  (Jobs explained why here; reality undistortion here.)

And, let's face it, it's becoming Apple's world. Suggestions?

Another great chess app for iPad / iPhone

e+Chess is a chess book reader that comes with one free title, Capablanca's Chess Fundamentals. (This is the same book I started to excerpt on this blog and will get around to finishing someday: it's out of copyright.) As you might imagine, displaying both the text of a chess book and an interactive chess board is a bit much on an iPhone, but it's legible in landscape mode.

Here's a screen capture from my iPhone: I touch "1.f5" on the left side (the text of the book), and the move is made on the board. And I can shuffle the pieces investigating my own variations (as long as the moves are legal). Cool.

Here's a screen capture from my iPad: as you can see, there's a lot more room on the larger screen.

Silman's Complete Endgame Course is available in this format for $17.99. You're much more likely to study the iPad version than the paperback! But unless you absolutely love your iPhone, I wouldn't buy the book to read on the tiny platform: just too darn small. But that's not the fault of this great app.  There are even nuggets of Silman's wisdom sprinkled through the text as audio files.    To be clear, e+Chess falls far short of the true multimedia available through ChessBase, but this is a promising start.

There's also a Valeri Beim book on middlegame strategy available in this format (Beim is one of my favorite authors, but I'm not familiar with this book), and a few oddball titles.  It remains to be seen how popular this format becomes (e+Chess could go the way of Betamax).  And the serious player is more likely to get more utility from ChessBase or PGN formats.  But ease of consumption is a strong counterargument: the platform looks very promising to me!

If you own an iPad and you want to join Vince Hart in studying Silman's Complete Endgame Course (an excellent book for anyone from complete beginning to aspiring master), you can't go wrong downloading e+Chess.  If you own an iPhone, download it anyway, if only to read a free interactive copy of Chess Fundamentals, one of the greatest chess books ever written.  But I wouldn't spend money on content unless you're buying for the iPad.

White to play 

As long as we're on this page, here's a famous passage.  Capa writes, "In the above position White can't win by 1.f5.  Black's best answer would be 1...g6, draws.  (The student should work this out.)"  Your thoughts, students?

My favorite chess app for the iPhone / iPad

As of now, it's tChess Pro version 1.7.1.  I've been using it on the iPhone for almost three years: the interface is easy and intuitive, the features are nice, and the playing engine is reasonably strong.  (I lost the first game I played against it, and many more since then.) There may be stronger engines, but tChess is snappy!

There's a dual core option on the iPad 2: not sure how many ELO this would add.  But if you're looking for raw strength, the iPhone and iPad are the wrong platforms.

Most of these screenshots are from my iPad, with the exception of one iPad screenshot grabbed from the developer's website.  But the iPhone look and feel is very similar: I don't feel all thumbs with this GUI even on a tiny screen (compare my ChessBase 1.1 hatefest, which was essentially a rant about ChessBase's GUI.)

I'm about to start a new game.

Grr...only a draw. (Trust me, I wasn't going to show you a screenshot with my usual rating of 1650.) And tChess was not set to play at full strength.

I can find out that the game was a Marshall Attack, ECO code C89.

Perhaps I should look at a Fischer game instead. Or I could look at the game that one of my Industrial League teammates just sent to me. Or I could open a database of my own games. Or I could play through the tournament game I just played on my iPhone, identify my gross tactical blunders, and email the game score to myself. (My biggest complaint: tChess Pro does not support any variations within PGN. It really should.)

You can have up to 25 PGN files on the device: before I started this review, I had twenty on my iPhone. One can copy and paste PGN into tChess, and perform some basic editing on PGN headers. Even the ChessBase of twenty years ago had far more advanced database features, but the ease of accessing the game you've forgotten is a delight.

I've never cared for 3D representations of the chess board: if I want 3D, I'll get out a set. But some folks think this is cool.

Frustrated by your ratings history? Delete and create a new player profile.

This app is well worth $7.99!

So maybe AAPL isn't incredibly overvalued?

I've belonged to the iPhone cult for several years. The iPad that I've owned for two days is kinda nice, too. Look for chess software reviews in coming weeks.... One problem with the iWorld is that it's not flash-friendly, and we're using ChessFlash to present games. Advice would be appreciated!

Worst iPhone chess app ever?

It would be rather harsh to call ChessBase Online 1.1 (ChessBase GmbH, $4.95 in the iTunes Store) a bad application, because, strictly speaking, it achieves its modest and useful goal.

I can enter a position that I reached in a recent game...

..and discover the most popular replies and their performance...

...and load individual games to learn how top players handled the line.

Select one of the above games, and it loads painlessly.  So far, so good.  (Very handy for the bathroom stall at the Chicago Open, the cynic thinks.) 

But on the iPhone 4, the chess board interface is so buggy and annoying (compare the interfaces for iPhone engines such as tChess Pro, Shredder, and Stockfish, all of which are excellent), that I really can't recommend this app.

Perhaps this works better on the iPad (I don't own one), but if I'm at home, I'm going to be looking at ChessBase on a laptop with Rybka running.  That's not yet an option on the iPad..

The concept is great, and I love ChessBase products in general. But not this one: hold out for Version 2.0.

a cool and free iPhone app

Any chess player (absolute beginner to master) with an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch should enjoy Chess Problems, a free application by PsyGames.

The interface is simple and intuitive.  One can choose from directmates (e.g., "mate in two moves"),  helpmates, and selfmates, sorted by level of difficulty (pawn to queen)

I knew the answer to the following one right away because my grandmother owned a mid-nineteenth century edition of Hoyle.  The chess section gave this problem (or one like it!), accompanied by a version of the legend of Princess Dilaram.

Bonus Socius manuscript, circa 1266 (!)

White to play and mate in two moves

Helpmates are fun!  In a helpmate in two moves, Black moves first, and the two sides work together to allow White to checkmate Black on White's second move.

Lind 1941

Helpmate in two moves

(remember that Black moves first in a helpmate!)

Selfmates are fun, too!

 Widlet, 1982

Selfmate in two moves

(White to play and force Black to checkmate White on Black's second move: unlike the helpmate, the two sides are not cooperating)

Some of the positions are easy enough for absolute beginners to solve.  But the simple king and queen vs. king position below took me 1:18 to solve.  I guarantee that anyone who knows the rules of chess and has a little patience should be able to solve it.  Some of you will see the solution at sight, others might need five minute to explore all the possibilities.

Courtenay, 1868

White to play and mate in two moves

And I sat staring for almost 17  minutes at this famous Mansfield two-mover even though I knew I'd seen it before.  As soon as one sees the key move, one slaps one's head and says, "Of course!"  But the trick is to find the key move...

I think that chess problems are of more than marginal benefit to practical players: they force us to understand the powers of the pieces, they push us to think outside the box, and they train us in brute-force calculation in bizarre positions.

Mansfield 1933

White to play and mate in two moves

I have one trivial complaint about this app.  When you find the key move, only one defense is offered, no matter how many times you play through the solution.  (Part of the beauty of these problems is that various defenses to the key move lead to various mates.)  But that's a quibble.

Strongly recommended!

chess on the iPhone (part 1)

Back in the 1980s, I was embarrassed when I started routinely losing to computers.  Now I lose to my telephone, and it doesn't bother me that much.  

Although I've lived my entire geek life in PC-land, I am a big fan of the iPhone.  The lectures on iTunes U are in my opinion enough to justify the two-year additional cost of ownership.  Having said that, I don't think the iPhone is an essential tool or even a particularly useful tool for chess players.  (They do make cheating on the toilet easier, so perhaps they are already de rigueur among a certain subset of World Open participants.)  But if you've already drunk the Apple Kool-Aid, there are a couple chess apps that are nice to have.  I thought I'd tell you about the ones I have.

ChessClock (Samuel Kass) is one of several chess timer iPhone apps.  It's not really suitable for tournament play.  No iPhone app ever could be, as the touch screen doesn't give you tactile feedback  (Nothing is more annoying than double-checking that you successfully stopped your clock in a time scramble.)  But you can put the iPhone in airplane mode, turn off the volume, and use it as an emergency tourament clock.  I've done this a couple times in the past year: it's acceptable for that limited purpose.

The clock is also the clock button!

There's also an "analog" mode: cute, but not very useful.

I play chess, so I'm not totally dense.  But I'm also one of those over-50 people who has delegated control of home entertainment systems to the teenager in the house, and I am intimidated by the non-intuitive methods of setting certain chess clocks.  ChessClock shines in this regard: it supports Fischer, Bronstein, and "USCF" (andante) modes (Bill Smythe explains the differences here) for any increment between 1 and 59 seconds.

There is no handicap option for giving one player a larger increment, but one can easily give one of the players more time in the main time control.  The settings are simple and intuitive.

You can only set the clock to the nearest minute, but the digital display gives you the nearest tenth of a second.  Strange. 

The price is right at $2.99: it's fine for casual rapid play (or family Scrabble games), and when the iPhone is fully charged, it can be used as an emergency substitute for a round of tournament play.  It won't work for blitz play because of the tactile feedback problem.  But if you use the app once, it pays for itself.  Recommended.