Chess coordinates trainer

Practise naming the squares until you stop counting. From White's side or from Black's, thirty seconds at a time.

• 64 squares
• 2 directions
• White, Black and mixed
• 30s rounds
• Free, no account

The two directions are two different skills

Almost everyone is better at one of these than the other, and almost nobody notices until they try both.

Find the square gives you a name and asks for the square. This is the direction you need when someone tells you a move, when you read a book, and when a coach says "look at f7". It is recall: name in, place out.

Name the square marks a square and asks for its name. This is the direction you need when you want to write a move down, describe a position to somebody, or read a puzzle back to yourself. It is recognition: place in, name out.

Train the one you are worse at. If your score in one direction is well below the other, that gap is the whole reason notation still feels slow.

Why knowing the squares matters

Coordinate fluency is not chess knowledge. It is the thing that has to be automatic before chess knowledge can get in.

• You cannot read notation without it. A line like 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 is unreadable if each square costs you two seconds of counting. Every chess book, every annotated game and every puzzle solution is written in these names.
• A coach or a video moves faster than you can count. By the time you have found c6, the explanation is two moves further on.
• Calculation runs on square names. Working out a line in your head means holding pieces on squares. If naming the square is itself effortful, there is nothing left over for the calculation.
• It makes patterns portable. "The knight on f5 and the rook on d1" is a thing you can remember and recognise later. "The knight over there" is not.
• You need it to write your own games down. Any club or tournament game with a real clock requires a scoresheet.

None of this needs weeks. Coordinates are one of the very few chess skills that go from painful to automatic in a handful of short sessions, which is exactly why it is worth clearing out of the way early rather than tolerating for years.

Why it is harder from Black's side

This is the part most beginners never practise, and it is the reason the side switch sits above the board rather than buried in a settings menu.

The square names are fixed to the board, not to the player. a1 is a1 for both sides forever. What changes is where a1 is in front of you. Play Black on any site and the board is turned round, so:

• a1 is now at your top right, and h8 is at your bottom left. Every anchor you learned from White's side is now in the opposite corner.
• The files run backwards. Left to right along your side of the board is h, g, f, e, d, c, b, a.
• The ranks count towards you. Your own pieces start on rank 8 and rank 7, and the numbers get smaller as they go away from you. Beginners who learned "rank 1 is my back rank" have to unlearn it.
• Your first move is still to a low-numbered square. Playing e5 as Black means pushing a pawn from e7 to e5, which is towards your opponent and down the numbers.

The failure mode is specific and very common: a player who is fluent as White silently converts every Black position by mirroring it in their head, which costs a second per square and quietly makes them worse at every calculation they do with the black pieces. The fix is to build the Black picture directly, and the only way to do that is to be asked, repeatedly, from Black's side.

Set the side switch to Black and expect your score to fall by a third. Once the two scores are close, switch to Mixed, which turns the board round after every single question so you cannot lean on the corner you last looked at. Mixed is the hardest setting here and it is the one that most resembles a real game against a real opponent, where you play both colours.

How to practise this properly

Five minutes a day for a week is more than enough. What matters is the order.

1. Day one, labels on, White, find the square. Get comfortable with the shape of the thing. Do not worry about the score.
2. Turn the labels off. This is the step people skip, and skipping it means practising how fast you can read the edge of the board. Your score will drop hard and then recover within a few rounds.
3. Add the other direction. Switch to naming the square. Expect it to feel unreasonably harder at first. It gets even quicker than the first direction once it lands, because recognition is faster than recall.
4. Switch to Black and start again. Labels back on for one round if you need them, then off.
5. Finish on Mixed. When you can score within a few points of your White score on Mixed with the labels off, you are done and you never have to think about this again.

Two habits make it faster. Say the square out loud as you tap it, because naming it aloud attaches the sound to the place and that is what recall reaches for later. And do not stop after a mistake: the trainer shows you the right square in green, moves on, and never takes points off you, precisely so that a bad answer costs you a second rather than a round.

The trick worth learning at the same time: square colour

While you are learning where c4 is, learn that it is light. Square colour decides more than beginners expect.

a1 is dark. So is h8, which is why the long a1 to h8 diagonal is called the dark diagonal, and a8 to h1 is the light one. From there the rule is short: a square is light when its letter and number are one odd and one even. a1 is odd letter, odd number, dark. e4 is odd letter, even number, light. d4 is even and even, dark.

This is worth the ten seconds it takes to learn because a bishop never leaves its colour for the whole game, so "my bishop is the light-squared one" instantly tells you which half of the board is permanently out of its reach. A knight, in contrast, changes colour with every move it makes, which is why a knight can never give check twice in a row from the same colour of square and why knight forks so often catch a king and queen sitting on the same colour. Use the Light only and Dark only options for a round or two of each and the colour arrives attached to the name.

Questions people ask

Once the squares are automatic

Coordinates are the door, not the room. The point of being able to read Nf3 without stopping is that every explanation in chess is now available to you.

• Chess puzzles for beginnersWhere to start once you can read a move
• Mate in oneThe first pattern worth drilling, and the easiest to check
• ForksThe tactic that wins the most material below master level
• All 49 motifsThe full guide index
• Printable worksheetsFree PDFs with answer keys, for clubs and classrooms