Chess tactics apps are a great tool to help develop your visualization and calculations skills over the chess board. If you are looking to get better at chess, then solving chess puzzles frequently is the way to go.
Chess is around 80% calculation and 20% strategy as most games require you to calculate as early in the opening when tension begins to build on the chess board. Solving chess tactics using an app will help you spot mating patterns, and combinations in your real games.
Having a chess tactics app installed on your phone, tablet, or desktop computer is very convenient and does the job even better than having a physical book of puzzles.
In this article, we will take a look at the 8 best chess tactics apps that you can download from both the apple store and google play store. With that said, let’s jump right in!
Here are the 8 best chess tactics apps:
- Chess Tactics Pro (Puzzles)
- Chess Tactics For Beginners (by Chess King)
- Chess Coach- Chess Puzzles
- Pocket Chess
- Fun Chess Puzzles
- Chessable
- Lichess
- Chess Tactics Puzzles (by TIMLEG)
1. Chess Tactics Pro (Puzzles)
Get better at chess with this large collection of chess puzzles for all levels. This tactic trainer lets you practice in 3 different modes:
- Solve daily puzzles
- Solve offline puzzle packs
- Use the “Progress” mode to get random problems of your level and know your Elo rating
All puzzles are of a high quality and are guaranteed to have a unique solution. The difficulty ranges from beginner to advanced (2000+ Elo).
The puzzles are divided into easy, intermediate and hard. When starting out for free, you get 150 easy puzzles, 100 intermediate puzzles, and 50 hard puzzles, making it a total of 300 puzzles.
150 Easy Puzzles
100 Intermediate Puzzles
50 Hard Puzzles
If you’ve finished solving those puzzles, you can purchase more for little over $4, bringing the total amount of puzzles to 3250. The amount of quality puzzles you receive for just $4 is definitely worth it.
Other cool features:
- A free powerful engine to analyze the puzzles
- Level history
- Bookmark puzzles
- Several board themes
- Optimized for both phones and tablets
- A simple and clear interface
Ratings: 4.6 stars (57k reviews), over 1 million downloads.
Click here to download:
For iOS devices (Apples Store)
For Android (Google Play Store)
2. Chess Tactics For Beginners
Offered by Chess King, “Chess tactics for beginners” is another great chess tactics app to improve your calculation skills. Rated 4.6 stars, this app has over 1 million plus downloads and is available on both iOS and android.
This course is based on a bestseller by the experienced coach Sergey Ivashchenko which became a sort of chess publishing sensation and sold over 200,000 copies. More than 1200 training exercises are intended for beginners. Elementary and simple tasks (1-, 2- and 3-way) are used as teaching material.
This course is in the series Chess King Learn (https://learn.chessking.com/), which is an unprecedented chess teaching method. In the series are included courses in tactics, strategy, openings, middlegame, and endgame, split by levels from beginners to experienced players, and even professional players.
With the help of this course, you can improve your chess knowledge, learn new tactical tricks and combinations, and consolidate the acquired knowledge into practice.
The program acts as a coach who gives tasks to solve and helps to solve them if you get stuck. It will give you hints, explanations and show you even striking refutation of the mistakes you might make.
What You Will Get
♔ High quality examples, all double-checked for correctness
♔ You need to enter all key moves, required by the teacher
♔ Different levels of complexity of the tasks
♔ Various goals, which need to be reached in the problems
♔ The program gives hint if an error is made
♔ For typical mistaken moves, the refutation is shown
♔ You can play out any position of the tasks against the computer
♔ Structured table of contents
♔ The program monitors the change in the rating (ELO) of the player during the learning process
♔ Test mode with flexible settings
♔ Possibility to bookmark favorite exercises
♔ The application is adapted to the bigger screen of a tablet
♔ The application does not require an internet connection
♔ You can link the app to a free Chess King account and solve one course from several devices on Android, iOS and Web at the same time
The course includes a free part, in which you can test the program. Lessons offered in the free version are fully functional. They allow you to test the application in real world conditions before releasing topics such as Mate in 1, rook checkmates, queen checkmates, bishop checkmate, mate in 2, piece sacrifices and much more!
Lessons Covered
Click here to download on:
Android (Google Play Store)
3. Chess Coach- Chess Puzzles
Chess Coach-Chess Puzzles is a thematic collection of chess puzzles for self training and tactics study. Improve your chess skills with these thematic chess puzzles.
Inside the chess tactics app you will get to:
- Learn the standard ideas of tactics.
- Get the best skills in the attack game.
- Win in every puzzle.
- Solve puzzles mate in 1 or more moves.
- Boost your level in checkmate positions.
- Sacrifice pieces to win in problems.
- Pass the challenge with timer.
- Train fast moves in puzzles.
- Study tactics positions every day.
Thematic Topics
The app features a variety of topics including:
- Mate in 1 puzzles
- Mate in 2 puzzles
- Mate in 3 puzzles
- Mate in 4 and more
- Fork
- Decoy
- Pinning
- Destruction of a guard
- Double attack
- Deflection
- Trap
- Discovered check
- Perpetual check
- Counterattack
Each of these topics has varying levels of diificulty (easy, medium, hard). That is 100 easy puzzles, 100 medium puzzles, and 100 hard puzzles, bringing the total amount of puzzles for each topic to 300.
Therefore, in total there are 4200 puzzles.
The app allows you to track your progress so that you can see the number of puzzles that you have solved for each topic.
If you are stuck at a puzzle, the app can show you a hint. You can also mark your favorite puzzles, so you can come back to them any time you like.
Moreover, you can choose the color theme of the chessboard to your liking.
Click here to download on:
4. Pocket Chess
Pocket Chess helps you improve and brush up on your Chess by offering hundreds of thought provoking Chess problems and Chess puzzles. From Checkmate in 2 to Checkmate in 4 and much more!
Pocket Chess is a new way to learn and improve at Chess. Featuring boards that are small and simple, important pieces are in focus so that you can learn to recognise Chess patterns faster and quicker. Improve your Chess Game and Download Now for free.
The boards are small to help you better recognize mating patterns in your real games
This chess tactic app is rated 4.5 stars (8.3k reviews) with over 100k downloads, making it one of the most popular chess tactics app in both the google and apple store.
Click here to download on:
Android (Google Play Store)
5. Fun Chess Puzzles
Fun Chess Puzzles is an addictive chess puzzle app that helps you improve your chess skills. Fun Chess Puzzles has a collection of more than 4000 carefully selected chess puzzles, which range from simple to extremely difficult.
Your rating is updated with each chess puzzle played. If you solve a chess puzzle, your rating increases, whereas if you fail to solve it your rating decreases.
Chess tactics displayed in the app are based on your current skill level. The rating is updated according to the Glicko-2 rating system, invented by Mark Glickman.
The chess puzzles include a wide variety of tactical motifs: checkmate, blocking, interference, pin, discovered attack, clearance, trapped piece, sacrifice, skewer, overloaded piece, advanced pawn, mate threat, removing the defender, X-ray attack, weak back rank, zugzwang, zwischenzug, perpetual and stalemate.
Features
• Intuitive user interface
• More than 4000 offline chess tactics, which range from 1000 ELO to 2500 ELO.
• Support for tablets
• Several chess themes
• ELO calculation, ELO reset, ELO history tracking (Glicko-2 rating system)
• Share chess tactics with your friends via Facebook, WhatsApp, email, and more.
• Chess notation for moves
• Next chess puzzle selection based on your current ELO
• Report invalid chess tactics
• Strong chess engine analysis where you can analyze alternative moves or solutions to chess tactics
• Statistics for completed tactics
• Analyze your Chess Pro/Analyze your Chess Free App Integration to easily analyze your favourite chess puzzles
• Google Play Games Achievements and Leaderboard
Free vs Pro version
• Pro version does not contain ads
• Pro version contains all the features of the Free version
• Pro version has German, Spanish, French language support.
• In the Pro version you can manage your own chess puzzles packs and solve puzzles from the imported chess puzzles packs. To learn more about this feature visit https://sites.google.com/view/funchesspuzzlespro/home.
6. Chessable
Chessable is one of the best place to learn and improve at chess online. It’s more than just a chess tactic app. Chessable is built for chess lovers and uses spaced repetition to make sure you never forget a move! Chessable is the one of the best place to learn chess online from the world’s top players.
Brought to you by world champion GM Magnus Carlsen, Chessable’s MoveTrainer technology prompts you to learn different moves, and then finds the optimal time for you to review them so you remember every detail.
Enjoy free courses on openings, the middle game, endgame, tactics and strategy to improve your chess skills with hundreds of free lessons.
You have the ability in the app to:
- LEARN: Learn new content from some of the best chess players in the world (including Magnus Carlsen).
- REVIEW: Review course content and video using our exciting MoveTrainer technology which prompts you to repeat moves and aids in memorisation.
- DISCOVER COURSES: Find new FREE courses and start learning them immediately.
- VIDEO CONTENT: View hundreds of videos and interactive lessons from top Grandmasters and coaches.
- PROFILE: View your profile where you can track your progress, XP points, streak, badges and more!
- SETTINGS: Be able to change your course, chapter, and global settings all within the app in order to be able to use Chessable to its fullest potential.
Subscriptions
Subscriptions offered in the app are as follows:
- Pro-Monthly: Get access to unlimited free courses, review of difficult moves, and countless other benefits available with Pro.
- Pro-Annual: Get access to unlimited free courses, review of difficult moves, and countless other benefits available with Pro.
7. Lichess
Lichess is the 2nd largest online chess platform besides chess.com with over 10 million plus downloads on the google play store. You can play matches with other players around the world, play in tournaments, watch your favorite streamers, engage in the community, analyse your games, and more importantly solve thousands of chess tactics to help develop your visualization and calculation skills.
You are given a rating, and for each puzzle you solve, your rating increases. However, the more puzzles you get wrong, the more elo points you will lose. There are 5 different modes: easiest, easier, normal, harder and hardest. The more difficult the puzzle you solve, the more points will be added to your rating.
Solve chess tactics on lichess and increase elo ratings
Lichess also has a powerful stockfish engine that you can use to analyse the puzzles with. This will help you make the most out of your training.
Click Here to download Lichess on:
Android (Google Playstore)
8. Chess Tactics Puzzles (by TIMLEG)
Do you want to get better at chess, improve your tactical vision or simply train your brain? Then TIMLEG’s Chess Tactics Puzzles app may be the perfect choice for you.
– You will play a huge collection of mates, endgame studies, opening traps and practical chess positions. Just like in real games, you never know what you will get.
– Your tactics rating will be constantly measured. The better you are, the harder the puzzles will get. You can also track your performance with a rating graph.
– The computer engine Stockfish 9 will help you analyze the puzzles. This chess engine is much stronger than the best human chess grandmasters.
– A simple layout will let you focus on the important. Simply slide to the right with your finger to analyze the previous tactic puzzle.
It doesn’t matter if you are a beginner at tactics or a chess grandmaster, this app will keep you happy for a long time!
What You Can Do With The App
- Play over 20,000 selected chess puzzles
- Use a big board that covers the whole screen
- See the opponent reply if you play a wrong move
- Analyze the tactics with the chess engine Stockfish 13
- Play without an Internet connection
- Enjoy a wide variety of chess tactics for all difficulty levels
- Keep track of your progress with a performance-based Elo rating
Click here to download on:
Android (Google Play Store)
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