Guides
CHESS
GUIDES
Practical chess guides for club and tournament players: tactics you can learn to recognise, endgame and pawn-structure fundamentals, ways to review and keep track of your own games, and guides to using ChessDiary itself. Where a guide shows a board position, the position and its claims have been checked against the Stockfish engine. Guides are published under the author's byline; see About for how they are made and how to report an error.
Tactics
Patterns you can learn to see on the board, and a routine for calculating them.
GUIDE 02
The Most Common Blunder Patterns in Club-Level Chess
Forks, back-rank mates, hanging pieces, and the in-between move — the handful of tactical motifs responsible for most lost games below master level.
GUIDE 09
The Back-Rank Mate: How It Happens and How to Stop It
Why castled kings get mated on the back rank, three ways to prevent it, and how to spot the combinations that exploit it, with verified board diagrams.
GUIDE 10
Knight Forks: How to Spot Them Before They Happen
Why knights fork so well, the royal and family fork patterns, and a scan that stops them in your own games.
GUIDE 11
Pins, Skewers and Discovered Attacks
Three line-based tactics side by side: how each works on the board, how to win material with it and how to avoid it.
GUIDE 12
Checkmate Patterns Every Player Should Know
Smothered mate, the Arabian mate, the ladder mate and Scholar's mate, with the key idea and defence for each.
GUIDE 19
Candidate Moves and Calculation: How to Think Before You Move
A repeatable routine for choosing a move, shown on two positions from Morphy's Opera Game.
Strategy & Endgames
The structures and endings that quietly decide games.
GUIDE 03
Opening Principles Every Improving Player Should Know
You don't need to memorize theory to stop losing in the opening. Five principles that keep you out of trouble in the first ten moves.
GUIDE 14
Pawn Structure Basics: Isolated, Doubled and Passed Pawns
What each pawn structure means, which weakness and compensation it carries, and which plan it points to.
GUIDE 13
King and Pawn Endgames: The Rule of the Square, Key Squares and Opposition
The three ideas that decide almost every king-and-pawn ending, with engine-checked diagrams.
Improving Your Game
How to review, track and learn from your own games.
GUIDE 15
Centipawns and Win Probability: What an Engine Score Really Means
What an engine score measures, how it maps to winning chances, and how to read swings when reviewing your games.
GUIDE 16
How to Review a Tournament Loss: A Step-by-Step Method
A 30-minute method for turning a lost game into one concrete rule, and a monthly count that shows your real weakness.
GUIDE 17
Time Management in Classical Chess: Where to Spend Your Clock
Why players run short of time, how to budget the clock, how to play when time is short, and the scoresheet rule.
GUIDE 18
What to Record in a Chess Journal (and What to Skip)
A five-field minimum for a chess journal, the fuller set if you want more, an example entry and a monthly review.
Scoresheets & Notation
Getting a game out of your head or off paper and into a form you can analyse.
GUIDE 01
How to Read (and Keep) a Chess Scoresheet
Algebraic notation basics, the parts of a standard scoresheet, and the handwriting habits that make a game easy to recover later — or impossible to.
GUIDE 04
How to Photograph a Scoresheet for Accurate OCR
Lighting, angle, and framing habits that make the biggest difference to how accurately ChessDiary reads a handwritten scoresheet.
GUIDE 05
How ChessDiary Reads Messy Handwriting (and When It Can't)
What parse confidence means, the most common handwriting misreads, and what to do when a scoresheet comes back uncertain.
Using ChessDiary
How the app imports, analyses and falls back.
GUIDE 06
PGN Import vs. Chess.com/Lichess Sync: Which to Use
The difference between uploading a single PGN and linking your account for bulk history sync, and when each one is the right call.
GUIDE 07
How to Read a Stockfish Blunder Report
What quality labels, centipawn loss, and tactical motifs actually mean — and how to use them to study a loss instead of just skimming it.
GUIDE 08
What Happens When the Analysis Engine Is Unreachable
ChessDiary automatically falls back to Gemini AI when the Stockfish server can't be reached. Here's exactly what changes.