What are move hints in chess apps?
A wooden board tells you nothing at all. It will not show you where a piece can go. It will not warn you that your king is attacked. It will not stop you making a move that is against the rules.
A move hint is a dot, a ring or a colour that appears on a screen when you pick up a piece. It shows every square that piece may legally go to.
Some boards add more. There may be an arrow for your opponent's last move, a warning when your king is in check, or a colour on an attacked piece.
None of that exists at a wooden board. The board is silent. Everything you know about a position, you worked out yourself.
Turning hints off is not about making chess harder for the sake of it. It is about practising the thing the game actually asks you to do.
What do the dots do for you?
Four jobs, and you probably never noticed three of them:
1. They count the moves. You never have to work out that a knight in the corner has two squares and a knight in the middle has eight.
2. They find the long moves. A square seven squares away lights up as clearly as the square next door. You never have to look along the whole line yourself.
3. They spot pins for you. A pinned piece shows no dots at all, so you are never told why it cannot move.
4. They stop illegal moves before you make them. You never find out that you were about to leave your own king under attack.
That last one matters most. At a real board that mistake costs you two minutes, and the second time it costs you the game.
Which moves do players miss without hints?
The same few kinds, again and again:
- Backwards moves. We look at a board forwards, so a rook coming back from the seventh row to the third is easy to miss.
- Long moves. A queen or a bishop travelling right across the board, especially along a diagonal.
- Quiet moves. Moves that give no check and take nothing, but set up a threat.
- Knight moves from far away. A knight standing well away from the enemy king can still reach it in two jumps.
- Captures by the piece you were not looking at. The board shows you what a piece can do; it never tells you which piece to pick up.
Every one of these can be trained. Pick up a piece in your head, name every square it can reach, and only then decide.
What is over-the-board practice, and how do you get it online?
Over the board, usually shortened to OTB, means chess played on a real board against a person sitting opposite you. That is what club and tournament chess is.
The gap between a screen and a board is not the pieces. It is everything the screen was doing for you. It showed legal squares, refused illegal moves, allowed takebacks and allowed premoves.
To practise the real thing online, you need a board that works like a real wooden one:
- No dots when you pick up a piece.
- Illegal moves allowed onto the board and then penalised, not blocked.
- No premoves.
- A clock that keeps running whatever happens to your internet.
- A promotion choice you make yourself, with no piece chosen for you.
How does ChessBinder live play do it?
Our live play is built to those rules.
Pick up a piece and nothing lights up. You may drop it on a square the rules do not allow. When you do, the move is taken back and your opponent is given extra time. That is fifteen seconds in bullet, one minute in blitz and rapid, and two minutes in a classical game. A second illegal move in the same game loses it, exactly as FIDE article 7.5 says.
There are no premoves, so every move is a decision you make with the position in front of you. The clock runs on our server and keeps running if your connection drops, the way it keeps running when you leave the table.
When a pawn reaches the last row, you choose the piece. Nothing is chosen for you.
A drill you can do in five minutes a day
Coaches call this board vision, and it improves fast:
1. Open any position and pick one of your pieces.
2. Say out loud, or write down, every square it can legally move to.
3. Check yourself, then do the same for one enemy piece.
4. Now find every move on the board that gives check, whether it is good or not.
5. Last, find every capture, including the ones you would never play.
Two minutes a piece, five minutes a day. After a fortnight you will notice long moves and backwards moves before you notice anything else.