Chess Flashcard Trainer ^TM

What is it?

This program is designed for the serious chess player. Using it will improve your tactical ability, calculation, time management, visualization skills, and pattern recognition. It does this in a very efficient manner, and in a user-friendly environment. The program is easy to use, and is based on an existing time-proven approach to chess training.

With this program, you can use exercise sets (positions) that you define yourself, or you can use one of the many free PGN (Portable Game Notation) exercise sets available on the internet.

Because you can make up your own positions for use with the program, your options are pretty unlimited. For instance, you could use it for opening training, tactical exercises, endgame studies, etc.

Compatibility

This program should run on any PC-compatible running windows 95 or greater, and windows NT 4.0 and greater.

Limitations of the Demo

The demo version can only read small PGN files, do three exercises per session, can read only a limited number of games from a PGN file, has limited help, and there is no support for copying PGN to the clipboard.

The full version only costs $14, and is a bargain when you consider that you can download thousands of problems off the internet for free. The full version can support large PGN problem sets, and has other minor enhancements. The proceeds from sales of this program go to support my website production and hosting costs (www.chessreviews.com and www.chessassistance.com ).

How to Get the Full Version

You can order online at the website: http://members.aol.com/rjpawlak/flash/index.html

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank both Armando Hernandez Marroquin for his freeware font Chess Cases, and Matthieu Leschemelle, the creator of Problemiste (http://www.problemiste.com), on which the font is based.

Why did you write this?

I have seen my share of chess software (I maintain the websites www.chessreviews.com and www.chessassistance.com ). While there are plenty of good training programs out there, none of them use this method for exercise presentation and study. While most training programs showcase their functionality by allowing the user to step through each exercise on a board, this does not improve the user’s power of visualization.

Certainly the ideas behind this program are nothing new. The training approach that it uses is time-honored, and recognized by chess coaches as one of the most efficient ways to train. The first place that I saw this concept applied was in August Livshitz’s highly successful series of tactics workbooks. I wondered why you could not use the same training approach in a computer program.

So I waited for an application like this to be written. After waiting a couple of years, I decided to write it myself. The result is this program, which I have called the Chess Flashcard Trainer (CFT), since it is quite similar to the flashcard training that people did before the advent of computers.

The program has several simple objectives

Improve visualization – By not allowing the user to step through the moves on a board (note: this can be done with an external program, using the PGN export facility in the full version).
Improve pattern recognition – By allowing the user to quickly present a random set of tactical exercises.
Improve calculation skill – Doing tactical exercises with this program will improve your ability to see and calculate forcing variations.
Improve time management – By providing a built-in timer. In tournament play, the clock is always ticking...

The Main Window

Clicking on the program icon should open the main window (shown below).

1. Board window – This displays the current test position. Usually this will be one of a sequence of positions. If you look at the exercise number window, it will tell you which position you are solving.

2. To move window – This window displays the side to move

3. Solution window – The solution window will only show a solution after the entire sequence of exercises is completed. When you complete the last exercise in the series, you will be able to review the answers by pressing the solution button (shown below)

4. Time window – Shows the time remaining for this exercise. You are limited in the total amount of time you can use to solve any particular exercise. So after the count-down timer reaches zero for this exercise, you will automatically be taken to the next one

5. Pause button – Pauses the clock

6. Exercise number window – Shows which exercise you are on, and the total number of exercises to complete

7. Next button – Takes you to the next exercise

8. Back button – Takes you to the previous exercise

9. Solution button – When you reach the last exercise in the set, this button will be enabled. Click on it, and you will be able to step back through the exercises, and review the solutions.

Menus

File -> Options – Opens the options dialog box. This allows you to set the time (in seconds) for each exercise, and the number of exercises to complete.

File -> New Exercise Set – Selects new exercises at random from the test.pgn file. It also resets the timers for each exercise.

File -> Quit – Quits the program.

Edit -> Copy PGN -> Clipboard – Copies the PGN data for the current exercise to the clipboard. So if you really get stuck (or don’t believe the answer), you can paste the PGN into one of the many available chess or database programs for further study. Consult the documentation for your particular program for instructions on PGN import from the clipboard.

Help -> Help File (HTML) – Shows you this file :-)

How to Change the Exercise File

Simply create or copy a PGN file to the directory where this application is installed (normally c:\program files\flashchess). The file name should be test.pgn. If there is sufficient interest, I will add the ability to open an arbitrarily named PGN file in the future. But for now, you are limited to a file with this name.

You can find a number of PGN files at Guenther Ossimitz’s site

Limitations of the Full Version

There is a limit of 100 exercises per exercise set. PGN clipboard operations are limited to 32kb per game (should never be a problem in normal use).

Possible problems

The board only shows gibberish – Caused by a failure of the install program to copy the board font to your fonts directory. Restart your computer, close down any tray or unnecessary background applications, and rerun the setup program. If this fails, you can manually install the CASES font in the program subdirectory.

The back button behaves strangely – If you can’t step back to a previous exercise, then it means you’ve run out of time for that one. This is intentional by design.

The board display is blank – This can happen when there are empty games in the PGN file. I have found that a number of exercise collections on the internet have blank games in them. To stop the blank display from occurring, remove the blank games from the test.pgn file. Reading a full game (without a FEN string) will also result in a blank display.

The program is locked up – I guess the program could lock, due to circumstances that I am unaware of. Note that reading large PGN files with thousands of positions can take a few seconds. Likewise, regenerating exercise sets from t large databases can also take a little while.

Other – Some programs may produce non-standard PGN. Chessmaster is one of these. If you are having problems related to the display of PGN data, then non-standard PGN is probably the issue. I have tested this program with Fritz, Chessbase, and Chess Assistant. They all produce valid PGN files that can be read by Flashchess.

Contact

You can contact me at the following addresses

rjpawlak@aol.com.

The FlashChess website is located at:

http://www.chessreviews.com

Chess Flashcard Trainer TM