English Chess Forum

I've been solving (and not solving) puzzles on Lichess.org for some months only to notice something fundamentally flawed...

If you login and then select Learn and then Puzzles it creates a puzzle for you which is rated.

Fair enough you might say.

However, on the page is also shown the source of the puzzle for example : From game #V8UMlmYa

If you click on this link it shows the source of the puzzle in full including the engine analysis of the position.

To me (maybe its me?) this is utterly pointless.

By all means show this information after you have attempted a solution and then succeeded or failed.

Seems bizarre.

I've also noticed the puzzles on chess24.com are by far more difficult then either chess.com or lichess.org and chess24.com uses an annoying stopwatch to make it even more annoying.

Lichess puzzles are on the easier side, and they tend to cap quite low compared to other websites.

As far as I know, chesstempo.com has some of the best puzzles, as well as lots of user comments and analysis for each tactics.
You can also filter tactics to suit your needs and create you own sets.

I agree that Chess Tempo is definitely the most testing tactics available. The sites new Endgame Benchmark training is also worth checking out for practical endgame training,

That is a very strange interface design decision

The LiChess puzzles I tried I think tended to show the limitations of using engines to automatically generate puzzles. They just weren't (broadly) terribly interesting.

"If you click on this link it shows the source of the puzzle in full including the engine analysis of the position."

So basically Lichess is giving you computer assistance to solve the problems? They should ban themselves immediately.

Does anyone else find that there is way too much crap getting submitted as "puzzles " - positions with multiple branches and solutions, positions that only win a trivial amount of material and leave you at the mercy of a knife edge attack, and worst of all positions that continue with a bunch of 'spite checks' after you have clearly demonstrated that you knew the winning tactic!

Anything that can't be solved in less then 10 seconds and has one clear winning solution has no place calling itself a puzzle as far as I am concerned!

Joey Stewart wrote: ↑

Mon Aug 03, 2020 6:12 pm

Does anyone else find that there is way too much crap getting submitted as "puzzles " - positions with multiple branches and solutions, positions that only win a trivial amount of material and leave you at the mercy of a knife edge attack, and worst of all positions that continue with a bunch of 'spite checks' after you have clearly demonstrated that you knew the winning tactic!

Anything that can't be solved in less then 10 seconds and has one clear winning solution has no place calling itself a puzzle as far as I am concerned!

They're not even being submitted by a human are they?

They felt very much like they're using a quick engine check of peoples games and noting when there's a jump in evaluation that someone missed in a game. So they might plausibly rate as meaningful training for exploiting blunders in blitz but....

The architecture of lichess seems to have a number of flaws. Not all of your games are recorded if there is a connection problem when the game ends. I have at least two victories that it has not recognized because as the result was sent the connection was lost.