A free chess trainer with no ads and no account
There is a lot of free chess on the internet and most of it is free in the way a magazine is free. This page is what Reflex Chess actually is, so you can decide before you spend a minute on it.
- 10,440 rated positions
- 87 skills in 16 sections
- rated 404 to 2783
- No ads, no account needed
What you get without signing in
All of it. The full course is 87 skills and 10,440 positions, every one of them rated, and none of it is behind a sign-in. You open the page and the first lesson starts. Your progress is stored in the browser, so it survives closing the tab without anyone needing your email address.
There is an optional account, and the only thing it does is carry your progress between devices. Nothing is locked behind it, there is no paid tier above it, and skipping it costs you no content.
No ads, and nothing that behaves like one
No banners, no interstitials, no video before the answer, no countdown to a subscription, and no puzzle that stops halfway to ask you to upgrade. The reason is not generosity. A trainer you use for five minutes a day is ruined by an advertisement in the middle of it, and it would not be worth building.
It works offline, and it does not need installing
It is a website. There is nothing to download, no store page and no executable. Open it in any modern browser on a phone, a tablet, a laptop or a Chromebook and it runs.
Once a page has loaded once, a service worker keeps it, so the trainer keeps working with the network off -- on a train, on a plane, or on a connection that has given up. Your progress is written locally and is still there when you come back.
If you want it to look like an app, your browser will let you add it to the home screen, and it then opens in its own window with no address bar. That is the same website, not a second thing to maintain.
On school and work networks. Some networks block whole categories of site, and a chess trainer is often caught by a games filter. If that happens, the thing to do is ask a teacher or whoever runs the network to allow the address -- the site is free, has no advertising and no chat, which is usually the whole of what an administrator wants to know. Working around a filter is not something we will help with, and it is a bad trade for a chess puzzle.
Where the positions come from
Every position is a real one, taken from the Lichess puzzle database, which is released under CC0. They carry Lichess's own difficulty ratings, from 404 to 2783, which is what makes it possible to say what is at your level rather than guessing.
They are arranged into 87 skills across 16 sections, each skill five graded levels deep and each lesson four positions long -- about two minutes. Answers are graded by a rules engine rather than by a stored string, and the project's test suite replays every position in the corpus through that same engine, so a lesson cannot accept an illegal move or reject a legal one.
What it is not
- It is not a place to play games against people. There is no matchmaking and no chat, which is deliberate.
- It is not an engine analysis tool. It grades the puzzle you are on and moves you along.
- It is not a video course. The written guides are here on the site and the practice is in the app.
- It is not finished. The course grows when the curriculum does.
Where to start
- How to get better at chessThe improvement guides, by rating band
- Every motif, one page each87 skills with worked positions
- Printable worksheetsTwelve positions and an answer key per set
- Chess for beginnersIf you are starting from the moves
Is Reflex Chess really free?
Yes. All 87 skills and 10,440 positions, no advertising, no paid tier and no account required. The optional account only syncs progress between devices.
Do I need an account to use it?
No. Progress is saved in your browser without one. An account exists only so that the same progress follows you to a second device.
Does it work offline?
Yes, once it has loaded once. It is a progressive web app with a service worker, so pages you have visited stay available with the network off and your progress keeps saving locally.
Is there an app to install?
There is nothing in an app store. It is a website, and your browser can add it to your home screen if you want it to open in its own window.
What are the puzzles?
Real positions from the Lichess puzzle database under CC0, rated 404 to 2783, arranged into a course rather than served at random.