Tactics
Over six million Lichess puzzles, tagged by theme. Difficulty follows your estimated rating, puzzles you get wrong return on a review schedule, and Maia-3 can tell you how often a player at your own level actually finds the winning move.
Chess improvement for Mac and Windows
Serious chess training software for Mac and Windows. One purchase. No subscription.
Tactics, the Woodpecker Method, opening repertoire training, endgames and the analysis of your own games — together in one app for Mac and Windows, powered by Stockfish. No account, no cloud, no recurring fee. Your training history stays on your own machine.
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Tactics White to move — find the fork.
Free for 15 days. $34.99 to keep it.
Download the full app today — every feature unlocked, no credit card and no account needed. After 15 days, a one-time $34.99 licence key keeps it working for good.
No subscription, ever. One licence key activates both the Mac and Windows builds, checked offline on your own machine.
6M+theme-tagged Lichess puzzles
Stockfish + Maia-3engine and human-style opponents
Syzygytablebase-graded endgames
0subscriptions, accounts or cloud sync
Train
Drill what actually wins games.
Eight ways to build pattern recognition, all feeding one spaced-repetition review queue — so what you miss comes back on schedule until it sticks, and your home screen always shows what's due today.
The Woodpecker Method
Three fixed, difficulty-ordered puzzle modules and a proven 7-cycle roadmap, so you always know exactly what to solve next and how you're supposed to be improving. The named training method, built the way it's meant to be done.
Endgames
A curriculum of endgame positions, graded move by move against Syzygy tablebases wherever the position is in range — so "correct" means provably correct. Stuck on one? A Learn button steps through Stockfish's own winning line move by move, with a plain-English reason for each one.
Rush
Score-attack puzzle runs to sharpen your speed under pressure, with your results tracked alongside everything else.
Ladder
Climb ten graded tiers, Wood to Grandmaster, in batches of twenty puzzles set at a fixed rating band. Get sixteen right on the first try and you promote to the next level; fall short and you get a fresh batch at the same one — no demotion, no timer, just steady, visible progress up the ladder.
Board Vision
The habit every player needs before playing any move at all: check, capture, threat, or the best move only if none of those apply. An optional hidden-moves mode freezes the board so you have to track the position in your head, not just react to what's in front of you.
Tactic or Not
The other half of the skill: spotting whether a tactic is even there. A fast, timed yes/no drill mixing real tactics with genuinely quiet positions, so answering "yes" every time doesn't work.
Visualisation
Blindfold training: memorise a mate-in-1 or mate-in-2 position, then the board disappears completely and you name a random square's colour and piece, and type out the full mating sequence from memory alone — no board to check against, no partial credit.
Not seeing something you'd want? Suggest a feature →
Study
Build a repertoire you can actually remember.
Prepare lines, write your own coaching notes, learn them properly, then test them against a live opponent.
Opening repertoire
Build your own lines with side variations and attach written coaching notes — Markdown-formatted, on any move. Learn each line in stages, from shown, to assisted, to played from memory, then drill it with random branches.
Spar from here
Reach any position in a drill and jump straight into a live game from it — against Stockfish at the strength you choose, or a human-style Maia-3 opponent once your preparation runs out.
Master games
Search Lichess's master-game database from inside your line editor, link the games that matter to a line, and step through them alongside your preparation.
Needs a free Lichess tokenRelated tactics
The editor surfaces puzzles that test the exact positions in your lines, so you can practise the tactics your openings actually produce.
Free analysis board
Set up any position piece by piece or paste a FEN, play both sides with the engine at full strength, take moves back, or jump straight to where you started. Every move comes with a short, plain-English reason -- the engine's own suggestion, each of Maia-3's human-likely candidates, and whatever you actually played.
Coach packs
Bundle repertoire lines with their annotations, Woodpecker sets and endgame positions into one pack file, and import someone else's in a click. Paid packs unlock with an offline licence key.
Already inside: a growing catalogue of free opening "Essentials" packs -- a concise White and Black repertoire for openings from the Ruy Lopez and Italian Game through every major branch of the Sicilian, ready to import at no cost.
Your own games
Turn the games you lose into the puzzles you need.
The most useful training material is the position where you went wrong. Chess Mastery Trainer finds those moments in your games — and leaves you in charge of what becomes a puzzle.
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Import
Bring in your games from Lichess or Chess.com — or simply play in the app; finished games are saved for review.
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Analyse
Stockfish walks the whole game and flags every mistake and blunder, sorted into opening, middlegame and endgame.
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Choose
Up to three clear, forcing tactics you missed are suggested per game. Nothing becomes a puzzle unless you add it — and you can take it back out.
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Train
Added positions join your tactics training, and your serious mistakes enter a spaced-repetition drill of their own.
More on analysing your own games →
Analyse it yourself first
An always-on evaluation bar sits beside the board, but the engine never volunteers the answer. Click through the game, ask for the best move only when you want it, and try your own ideas in a variation that saves itself as you go. Branch from more than one position in the same game and every idea stays listed, ready to pick straight back up later -- add a note or draw arrows on any move to capture exactly what you were thinking.
See it from a human's side
Optional human-rating context, powered by Maia-3, shows whether a player at a chosen rating — anywhere from around 800 to 2400 — would have been likely to find the move you missed, plus the win/draw/loss odds Maia-3 predicts from there. One click sweeps every rating at once, so you can see exactly where a mistake stops looking like one.
Play & track
Play real games. See real progress.
Practice sticks when it's tested — and when you can see it working.
Stockfish, at your strength
Play a full game against a bundled Stockfish, from a gentle beginner setting right up to full strength. Choose your colour, and switch on the engine after the game to see where it turned.
A human-style opponent
Optional. Maia-3 plays like a person at the rating you choose — anywhere from around 800 to 2400 — with human-looking mistakes rather than an engine's cold perfection. It's a PyTorch neural network, and its checkpoint is downloaded from Hugging Face only if you ask for it.
Add a clock
Turn on an optional Fischer clock for any game, against Stockfish or the human-style Maia-3 opponent alike. Pick a preset from bullet to classical — 5 minutes + 10 seconds is one — or set your own time and increment.
Daily review
Your home screen shows what's due across tactics, Woodpecker, openings, endgames and your own middlegame mistakes, plus your current streak and where you left off.
Stats and weak spots
An activity heatmap and a breakdown by theme show what you're actually bad at — so the next session can go straight at it.
What's your Maia-3 rating?
Compare your own moves, across every game you've played or imported, against what Maia-3 predicts a human would play at each rating level — and find out which one your own style matches best. A different, more human answer to "how good am I?" than a puzzle score alone.
Own it
Buy it once. Keep it.
One purchase
No subscription and no account. Download it, own it. $34.99, one time — that's the whole price.
Runs on your Mac or PC
Training, analysis and play all run locally. The internet is only used when you ask it to: importing games, searching master games, updating the puzzle database, or downloading the optional Maia-3 checkpoint.
Your data stays yours
Your repertoire, your games and your training history live in a database on your own machine — nothing is uploaded, and there's no cloud sync to switch off.
One licence, both platforms
Buy once and your licence key activates both the Mac and Windows builds — no separate purchase if you use both, or switch later.
Questions
Good to know
Is this a subscription?
No. It's a one-time purchase of $34.99, with no account and no recurring fee.
Which computers does it run on?
Mac (Apple Silicon -- M1 or later) and 64-bit Windows. It installs like any other Mac or Windows app.
Do I need to buy it twice for Mac and Windows?
No. One licence key activates both the macOS and Windows builds -- buy once, and use it on either, or both.
Where do the puzzles come from?
From the open Lichess puzzle database — over six million puzzles. You import them once from the app's Setup page; the import runs in the background with a progress bar, and the same page can check for a newer database later.
Do I need an internet connection?
Not to train, analyse or play — all of that runs on your Mac. You need one to import games from Lichess or Chess.com, to search master games, to update the puzzle database, and to download the optional Maia-3 checkpoint from Hugging Face.
What engines does it use?
A bundled Stockfish for analysis, play and grading, with Syzygy tablebases for endgames within range. The optional human-style opponent runs Maia-3, a PyTorch neural network whose weights are downloaded from Hugging Face on request.
Does it upload my games or training data?
No. There's no account and no cloud sync. Games are only fetched from Lichess or Chess.com when you ask, and they're stored on your own machine.
What happens to the tactics it finds in my games?
They're only suggestions. Each game shows up to three, and a position joins your puzzles only when you add it. Change your mind and you can remove it again, or dismiss the ones you don't want.
Ready to give it a try?
Free for 15 days, the full app, no credit card. $34.99 for a licence key to keep it after that.