Board vision · unit 1

Naming squares

Finding any square on the board without counting up from a1.

Not started
clean = right, and inside the cap
What this unit is for

Everything after this is addressed in coordinates. If e4 costs you a moment's arithmetic, that moment is spent on every question in every later unit, and it compounds.

The target is not that you can work a square out. It is that you do not work it out.

Not in this unit
Block 1Read · ~8 min

The rules

Level C flips the board

The last third shows the position from Black's side. This is where people who have been reading square names off screen position rather than off the coordinate system find out. It is meant to be uncomfortable.

Block 2Do · ~20 min

Practice — ten positions, with the answer shown

The clock runs but nothing is at stake. Feedback is full at first and thins out, so by the last three you get the answer and nothing else.

Block 3Do · ~12 min

The check — twenty positions you have not seen

Drawn fresh from a held-out pool, so a retake is a new set rather than a memory test. No feedback until the end.

The gate is 18 of 20, each inside its cap. Two misses is not generosity — it is the width of a bad day. A third means the rule has not automated yet, which is a reason to keep drilling and not a verdict about you.

Block 4Ask · open-ended

The misses are the useful part

Add anything you got wrong, or got right and did not trust. The button below assembles every added position into one block of text and copies it. Paste it into the tutor project and argue about it.

Ask for the rule, not the answer

You already have the answer; it is in the packet. The question worth asking is which rule you applied wrongly, and whether the mistake was the rule or the reading. Those need opposite fixes — a misremembered rule gets restated, a misread board gets drilled.