Know the board

What it trains

Knowing the board itself, the way you know your own street. Square colours decide which bishop matters and whether a pawn ending is lost, the starting squares are the map every opening is described against, and which squares share a diagonal, or what gets somewhere in one move, is the geometry a tactic is made of. Distance and reach are the same knowledge in an endgame: a king travels diagonally for free, so a1 to d4 is three moves and not six, and a knight on the rim attacks a quarter of what it attacks in the middle.

How to use it

There is no board here on purpose. The moment you can see one, the drill measures how fast you can look rather than what you know. The questions ask for a square's colour, which man starts on it, whether two squares share a colour or a diagonal, which piece gets from one square to another in one move, how many king moves it takes to walk there, how many squares a knight or a king attacks from where it stands, the colour a named piece starts on, and which of the two bishops a named one is.

Thirty seconds on the clock and three mistakes end the run. Two things worth saying out loud once: the long diagonals, a1 to h8 dark and a8 to h1 light, and the queen starting on her own colour, which puts d1 light and d8 dark. The attack question asks each count equally often, which the board does not: a knight attacks eight squares from 16 of the 64 and two from 4, and the edge is where a count surprises people. Neither pad is built around its answer, which would put the answer in the middle of it: the attack keys are the counts that piece can have anywhere on the board, and the distance keys are four in a row drawn before the answer is.

The other drills