Add anything you got wrong, or got right and did not trust, from any unit. 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.
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.
Finding any square on the board without counting up from a1.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Every square a piece hits, seen at once rather than traced one line at a time.
Counting attackers, in unit 3, assumes you can already see what a piece attacks. If that step is a trace rather than a glance, counting becomes tracing several times over and the clock beats you.
This is also where the blocker rule gets built, and the blocker rule is the one that decides most miscounts later.
Because that is the square a capture would happen on. A rook on a1 with a friendly knight on a4 attacks a2, a3 and a4 — the knight's square included, which is exactly what makes the knight defended.
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.
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.
How many pieces hit a square — fast enough that the answer arrives before you have finished asking.
Every question in the seeds course reduces to this one. Is that piece loose? is "zero defenders." Is it underguarded? is "more attackers than defenders." If counting is slow or wrong, everything built on top inherits the error and you never find out where it came from.
So the target is not accuracy. It is accuracy under a clock. Counting correctly in forty seconds is not board vision — in a real game that budget is already spent on something else.
These pull in opposite directions and the difference is worth holding onto. Legality is about this position: a pin, a check, a king that would step into danger. Ignore all of it. Capture geometry is about the piece itself and never bends — a pawn cannot capture forwards in any position, so the square ahead of it is not attacked, not even a little.
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.
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.
Sweeping a whole position for undefended material — the question the seeds course is built on.
This is the unit the other three were for. Loose pieces drop off is the oldest slogan in tactics, and it is only useful to someone who can find them without being told to look.
It is also the first unit where the answer is sometimes nothing. Deciding a position has no loose material is a real answer and a real skill — puzzles never ask it, and games ask it constantly.
Roughly one position in ten here has no loose material for the side asked. Submitting an empty answer is how you say so, and it is scored the same as any other answer. If you find yourself tapping something because a question must have an answer, that is the reflex this unit exists to break.
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.
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.
All four skills mixed, because a game does not tell you which one it wants.
Each unit drills one question in isolation, which is how a skill is built and not how it is used. Here they arrive shuffled, so part of the work is recognising which question you are being asked before answering it.
This is the last thing between you and the seeds course.
In a single unit you know the question before you see the board, so the recognition is free. Mixed, you spend part of every cap working out what is being asked — which is exactly what a real position costs you.
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.
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.