Aimchess: A Review
Hello, my fellow chess pupils, and welcome to another edition of the Osaka Papers. AI has impacted our world in a plethora of ways. From badly written university essays to grossly biased social media news feeds, AI is continuing to evolve and expand its sphere of influence.
And I, for one, welcome our new cybernetic overlords.
AI's latest conquest would appear to be in the field of chess learning. Aimchess is an AI powered and analytics suite that offers personalized guidance and exercises based on a users own games.
Aimchess
© 2023 Aimchess
Aimchess was acquired by Magnus Carlsen's Play Magnus Group in 2021, which itself was acquired by chess.com in 2022. For transparency sake, I would like to state that I am not being renumerated in any way, shape, or form for writing this review....but I should be...O_o...
I have been using Aimchess for a little over two years now, and have found it to be a great learning tool, that is not to say it does not come with some faults.
Allow me to enlighten you.
The Pros
The Training Room
The app has an overabundance of training features:
Advantage Capitalization - Finds games you've lost while having a big advantage at some point, and allows you to replay them against the Engine.
Practice Visualization - Improves your board visualization with a variety of challenges that gradually increase in difficulty.
Intuition Trainer - Trains your tactical spidey-sense, so to speak, by giving a sequence of moves played in a game. It is your job to find which of those moves was a mistake.
Retry Mistakes - Compiles a set of positions where you've made a mistake. It is your task to find a better move and try to understand why you made the initial mistake.
Opening Improver, Checkmate Patterns, Blindfold Tactics...The list goes on, but for brevity's sake, I have only mentioned my favorites.
So, if you're struggling in one area of the game, you can tailor your training to target it.
Daily Plan
This feature gives your daily training a little more structure than simply hitting puzzle rush for 20 minutes a day.
The section changes from day to day, but usually includes: Tactics, Endgame, Defender, 360 Trainer and Blunder Preventer, in my opinion these are the top 5 features on the site. You complete this section by doing a little over a dozen puzzles.
Daily plan forces us to practice areas of our game, that we might otherwise avoid...endgame, I'm talking about endgame.
Scouting
I have heard it said that "One spy in the right place is better than 20,000 men in the field.", with the Scouting feature you are able to practice the timeless art of espionage.
If you know your opponent's user name for chess.com or that other site (that shall not be named) then you can generate a 40-game analysis, which will include their favorite openings, strengths, weaknesses and win rate.
You can also generate a full report on your own performance.
By itself, I don't think this will win you the game, but if you're at an OTB tournament it is nice to have any advantage you can.
THE CONS
It ain't free
There are some of you out there, who absolutely refuse to spend money on chess, you're out of luck with Aimchess. I pay the equivalent of about $15 a month, which I don't consider to be exorbitant, but if you're on a strict budget I can understand if you find this cost irksome.
At the end of the day, most of live in capitalist countries and need to come to the realization that communism doesn't work...if you want to use Aimchess you gotta pay.
Bugs
For the most part, Aimchess has done a great job at fixing the bugs and glitches that addled the site. Yet, at one time, they were quite a problem. You might've been logged out for no reason, or the puzzles wouldn't work perfectly, the pieces wouldn't move, it was pretty annoying.
In their defense, they have a great customer service team that would answer my complaints really quickly, and if you experience a problem there is a "report bug" button on every feature.
Although, bugs are rare, they can happen.
My Daily Plan
As I said earlier, my favorite feature is the Daily Plan, not only do the puzzles offer targeted themes, they seem more realistic as they tend to be a little more subtle, than puzzle rush tactics.
Here are five puzzles from my daily plan, good luck solving all five on your first attempt, if you can it means you're a better puzzle solver than me...I screwed up on a couple of these.
360 Trainer
When the chess game is over, the pawn and the king go back to the same box.
– Irish Saying
360 Trainer is not your regular puzzle: the position presented may be offensive or defensive tactics, equal position or even a mistake from one of your recent games.
Are there tactics available or not?
Tactics
Tactics flow from a superior position.
– Bobby Fischer
Good old fashioned tactics. This one is rated around 2150.
Be careful of Red Herrings.
Defender
When your house is on fire, you can’t be bothered with the neighbors. Or, as we say in chess, if your King is under attack, don’t worry about losing a pawn on the queenside.
– Garry Kasparov
Defender is comprised of positions designed to teach you how to defend complex positions, a weakness of mine, so I always spend extra time on these. This one is rated around 2100.
How should you deal with White's attack?
Endgame
After a bad opening, there is hope for the middle game. After a bad middle game, there is hope for the endgame. But once you are in the endgame, the moment of truth has arrived.
– Edmar Mednis
Everyone's favorite phase of the game. These positions are designed to improve your endgame tactics. This one is rated around 2150.
Can you force the advantage?
Blunder Preventer
The blunders are all there on the board, waiting to be made.
– Savielly Tartakower
My least favorite trainer, meaning it is the most important. These positions are meant to help you practice decision making by choosing correct moves. You are given two options, one is a blunder. This one is rated around 1300.
Should you play...f5? or ...Bd1?
Two Thumbs Up
And that's it, that's my review of Aimchess.
I give the app two thumbs up. From it's innovative features to its personalized content, it is a great way for us chess pupils to improve specific areas of our games. Although, there are some faults, they are few and far between.
One piece of advise I would give to those considering using Aimchess is to make sure you get your reps in. It is one thing to have Aimchess, another to use it consistently. I tend to spend at least 30 minutes a day going through the different puzzles and exercises and that barely scratches the surface of what the app offers.
As always, thanks for reading and feel free to share these puzzles with friends down at the Temple or Bar.
Cheers, SheldonOfOsaka.
