Organize and memorize your opening knowledge.
Chess Arsenal for iOS puts you in command of a customized opening repertoire.
It begins with a blank database that you fill with your own curated opening preferences. This is your Repertoire.
Enter favorite opening systems from books, update them to trends in Grandmaster games, and revise lines between rounds at your next tournament.
Enter Training Mode to practice quizzes and memorize your openings. Quiz answers are based on your personal repertoire, not popularity or the statistical decisions of computers. Find what works for you and out-prepare your opponents!
Repertoire Management
- Enter opening variations and specify the key moves you want to play.
- Provide alternate moves for when you choose to vary your lines.
- Name your openings for refined training.
- Tag unstudied moves and easily expose gaps in your repertoire.
- Build lines for White and Black without switching contexts.
- Record annotations (!, ??, ?!, etc.) and take notes on each move.
- Export to PGN file via email.
Training Features
- Train specific variations or random lines from your repertoire.
- Random questions are weighted toward past test failures.
- Train black, white, or both sides.
- Repeat failed quizzes until you get them right.
- Jump to the repertoire screen to review forgotten answers.
- Find your best and worst results sorted by percentage correct.
- Identify opening weaknesses for further study.
Don’t be caught off guard at the board. The best time to prepare is before the game!
Find Your Training Regimen
Fill Chess Arsenal with your favorite openings and all their side-lines. Tell it which response you would play in a tournament. These moves come from your own research, not the app, so you are building a truly personalized opening repertoire. Improve your organization by naming openings. These can be chess names (“Sicilian Defense”) or custom groups (“Bob’s Opening”); it’s up to you!
Do you have a standard response to 1. e4, but change it against a particular player? Enter both moves into your repertoire and add a comment to explain the alternative.
Switch to training mode and your openings are played back until a key position is reached. Do you remember the move you prepared when you built your arsenal? Train against your entire database or focus on specific openings by using the quiz filter.
Identify openings to study by reviewing your training results. Feeling confident with certain moves? Tell Chess Arsenal to skip them while training and focus on more challenging lines.
PGN Export
E-mail or export your entire repertoire in the popular Portable Game Notation (PGN) format for import into most chess software.
The PGN export contains all the moves you looked at, with your repertoire moves noted in comments.
To use the email export, copy the text from your e-mail into a text file and rename it with a “.PGN” extension, or Copy-Paste the e-mail into certain chess programs.
I love the app.
We need a way to edit the order of moves, though.
Right now, moves list in alphabetical order. You can assign moves to be “key moves” which brings them to the top, but all key moves stay in abc order. I don’t want to see a4 listed before c4, for instance.
Hi John, sorry I didn’t respond sooner! If you’re still using the app, check out the “…” button from any position. As of last month you can reorder moves from there.
Regards,
Brian
Awesome, thanks! I’ll check it out! – John Lattier
Hi I am a big fan of chess arsenal. It is now an essential part of my training. However as my opening repertoire has grown bigger I have run into an issue. Maybe it needs a bug fix or maybe there is a way around it that I do not know. What I am finding is that I want to rest certain lines but increasingly each of the moves in those lines is being switched to “skip in training”. Then I have to go through each of the moves in the repertoire to switch off “skip in training” in order to test those lines and it is taking a long time.
Hope you can help.
O.
Hi Ollie, I’m sorry the Skip feature went awry. I’m not sure how this could have happened. If you want to send me your DB I can reset them all back to “don’t skip,” and maybe get some insight to help fix the bug.
To send a DB, open iTunes to the device icon. Under “Settings” on the left, choose Apps and scroll down to “File Sharing.” Click “Chess Arsenal,” and drag the “Database” folder to your desktop. Right click its icon, “Compress Database” and email (or Google Drive, etc.) that file to ChessArsenal @ gmail.com.
Brian
Love this app. I am running into the 15 move limitation. Some lines of the Dragon for instance start around move 12. Can the 15 move limit be expanded?
Hi Mike, I’m just now catching up with comments. When you import a PGN file, tap on the text saying “Importing Games up to Move 15.” You can change the number of moves or clear any limitation. I agree that some lines are incredibly long before they get going.
I’m looking at you, Ruy Lopez!
Dear Brian,
Thanks so much for this awesome app: everything is smooth, neat and efficient, great piece of work !
My enthusiasm for this app brought me a (ambitious?) suggestion for a future release.
Since I am planning to use extensively Chess Arsenal, I take the time to detail the idea below that I would love to see included. It is rather long because not straightforward to be clear and concise simultaneously. I have not found anywhere else to share this.
tl;dr => implementing a tree-based structure of the repertoire would be a tremendous achievement.
I am only a really recent user of Chess Arsenal and just a humble chess amateur so hope this is not too naïve or unrealistic, but I am convinced that this could be an amazing new feature.
Structuring the mental representation of a repertoire helps its visualization and therefore its memorization (conjointly with the key drilling exercises your app proposes).
For instance I found that being able to stream mentally the different lines and the related important crossroads, while having a general depiction (a map) of the repertoire in mind is a great resource for consolidating openings knowledge.
Having such a global representation would complement greatly the local learning of the “what’s the next move in such position?” process.
Even if different solutions exist, the most common global representation would be to map the repository with a tree-based structure.
For the moment, in the app, the repertoire can be seen as a list – with no tree-based structure, and only in the Results and in the Training Filter tabs.
So, that would be great if:
1) There would be another tab dedicated only to repertoire visualization => the “map” with the hierarchy of the names given to each nodes of the tree if any or the key move if not. The depth of this tree could be limited for obvious reasons. Among the different advantages of such a global visualization, it would be easier to jump straight to a given position and to identify holes in the repertoire concerning the range of possible opponent’s replies.
2) Results and Training Filter tabs could be displayed within a tree-based structure (e.g. Open Sicilian > Najdorf > English Attack > 6… e5). That would facilitate the selection of subpart of the repertoire one wants to work on (if any sicilians, just one click on the parent node, instead of clicking on all the related lines – Najdorf, Dragon, Alapin, …). Here again, the depth of the tree could be limited (easier implementation, preventing overwhelming information, etc.) and, for the Results tab, the final leaves of the tree could be a list of all related subvariation from this node (as it is now for all named variation) with their respective score. Naturally, the option to itemize all the lines irrespectively of their hierarchy (just as it is now) could be kept, and the choice of the display could be made by the user.
3) A secondary feature to be coherent with the hierarchical structure would be to indicate the name – if any – of a upcoming line associated with the next move when navigating into the repertoire. This way, in a given position, it is easier to localize it within the whole map of the repertoire. And it helps to learn association between algebraic notations and names. For instance, after 1. e4 (in the blue frame), the following moves are available with their names next to them:
1 … d6 Caro-Kann
1 … c5 Sicilian
1 … etc.
A similar feature could be designed in the Reorder Moves tab.
Another remark related to this: to facilitate the mental representation of the tree, I like to give names to each node whenever possible. For instance:
1. e4 (King’s Pawn)
1… e5 (Open Game)
etc.
The consequence is that these names (King’s Pawn, Open Game) appear in the list of the variations in the Results and in the Training Filter while being not meaningful there since they are not associated directly with any key move. I think that would be great to prevent variations without any key moves to appear in these tabs (if the tree-base structured is adopted, then this issue do not matter anymore since they naturally appear at the nodes they belong to, leading toward lines with key moves).
Another consequence is that, since I am adding names as often as possible, the list of named variations tends to be very very long, what is not practical. That would be easier to compact everything within a tree (another argument for this idea…).
This conceptual suggestion may sound scary in term of development but I am sure that it is doable since it would only exploit already existing information (variation names and their ordering). Its graphical implementation may take different forms, but simplicity should be the main decision driver as always.
If I can help in any way for this, that would be my pleasure, so do not hesitate please to ping me.
Best and thanks again – notably if you have read until here!
Clement
Thanks for the app. Wish list:
1. Toggle option not to have the stars on a correct quiz answer.
2. Toggle option to auto advance on correct answer, instead of having to click “next problem” each time.
3. Option to have several repertoires. I know I can train from a named position, but a personal preference for me would be to have separate white and black repertoires. At the moment I need to delete the repertoire and import the pgn repertoire I want, but of course I then lose all my training info.
Regards
Alan
This is an excellent and powerful app for studying, training and memorizing your own custom chess opening repertoire for black and white. Reread the developer’s app description a couple of times and let it sink in — it’s amazing! See the power and potential this app offers you for your opening preparation. Input your repertoire for white and black with as few or as many openings, variations and depth of lines as you like. Once your repertoire has been input, positions and variations named and key moves identified then the fun begins as you train and drill on your repertoire openings, key moves and variations for black and white. You can drill on your entire opening repertoire for black and white all at the same time or selectively choose sides, openings or variations to focus on. By reviewing the training results you can quickly identify those lines that need further study and then focus your training drills on those until you’ve got your whole repertoire down cold.