Grinding away on Chessable

After a fairly long absence I've returned to using Chessable recently and have started having many of the same frustrations that led me to stop using it before.

Most likely anyone who's scoured chess websites deeply enough to have found this blog is already aware of Chessable, what it is and what it does. But just in case there are a few who aren't, here's a quick rundown. Chessable is a website (chessable.com) or app where you load various "courses" or "books" into a computer interface and learn chess content on a computer or phone the same way you would with a paper-and-glue book except that it's interactive. Chessable's claim to fame is spaced repetition--you're given the same puzzles a number of times over a long time period, more or less often depending on whether you get them right or not. The courses are either original content produced specifically for Chessable or a Chessable version of an existing book. Many of the shorter Chessable courses are free, but others are for sale at prices ranging from less than five dollars up to around forty dollars. Many courses (even free ones) include some video content, the price of which can get quite steep for the paid courses.

The Chessable library is quite extensive and has courses covering just about any aspect of chess, but there are more courses on openings than anything else. This was also true when books ruled the world of chess learning and I suspect is a product of market forces; that's what sells.

Ironically my experience has been that the spaced repetition feature is probably more helpful for courses involving tactics or endgames rather than openings. Tactics puzzles and theoretical endgame positions typically involve one correct move and/or idea and there is one clearly correct answer. If you get the puzzle wrong Chessable won't tell you why your answer is incorrect, but when you see the correct answer you can almost always figure it out. Openings are different. There are a lot of different ways to play openings, and the specific lines a Chessable course wants you to learn aren't necessarily the only reasonable way to play that opening. That makes learning a lot harder because it encourages you just to play the moves you're told to, not understanding why other possible lines of play aren't just as good. In some cases they are just as good. Worse, the spaced repetition encourages mindless memorization: in this position, play this move. You do that same position a dozen times and eventually you might remember it, but that doesn't mean you understand it. The exercises you see most often are the ones you answer incorrectly, so you're constantly reinforcing moves that you may not understand. I question the value of this even assuming you're able to remember the moves eventually. As with any opening memorization without understanding, eventually your opponent will play something you haven't seen before and you'll have no idea what to do.

One of the problems I have when going through a Chessable openings course is that many lines go seven or ten or a dozen moves deep and when I've done them many times I'm able to remember all the moves when I realize what line I'm in, but I'm not reacting to the opponent's moves at all. What I'm doing is remembering that the sequence is , say, 1. b3 2. Ba3 3. Ne4 4. Bxe4 5. 0-0 6. Rfe1 7. Rac1 8. Qd3 9. Qc4 after which supposedly I'll have a big advantage. I remember what moves I'm supposed to play and in what order, but I don't remember what my opponent's moves were because I didn't have to in order to get through the exercise. Needless to say this is not very much like a real game, where your opponent will not cooperate with what you're doing. Some will say that if I'm doing this then I'm not studying the courses the way they were intended to be studied, and they're right, but the system encourages this sort of superficial memorization of moves. I get a dopamine-inducing thrill for getting the sequence right, even though I know I'm not really learning anything useful.

The spaced-repetition feature of Chessable often has you repeating earlier exercises before you get to the later parts of the course. You don't have to do it that way, and you can do the entire course before repeating any exercises, but it will be difficult to remember the lines you learned at the beginning of the course if the whole course consists of hundreds of moves, which even the shorter courses usually do. It makes more sense to repeat the early exercises several times until you have them down pretty well and can then move on to the later ones, which I think is how it's meant to be done and presumably the way most people do it. This creates another difficulty for me, which is that I end up getting behind on repeating the early exercises and never get to the second half of the course. Sometimes when I log on I have a hundred or more exercises to repeat and I like to get through all the repeat exercises before I tackle new ones, since if I do that then I have the same hundred to get through plus repeating the new exercises. It's even worse if you're trying to learn several courses at a time. I can do a hundred exercises in a day but not every day, and I usually only get through some of the backlog. It's hard to do Chessable just a little bit; you need to go whole-hog to finish everything. I guess it's not a problem for a lot of people but it's a problem for me.

Yet for all that, I still find Chessable useful. I've bought a couple of courses and have done many free ones and have learned at least the basics of several openings that way. I think the tactics and endgame courses are more suited to Chessable's spaced repetition format, but the openings courses will help you too. No learning tool is a magic wand and you have to put in a lot of effort with Chessable to realize any improvement, just as you would if you were using good old-fashioned books. It's difficult to improve at chess no matter what training tools you use, and it would be foolish not to use a good one just because it isn't perfect.