Chess Opener App Reviews

Truly great app. I havent seen any other program like it. Invaluable for the club player especially.

Its like Glaurung, but with an openings reference. Seems to work very well. One request: PLEASE add the ability to display Glaurungs analysis/evaluation as you go through (and/or beyond) the book moves. That would assist immensely with openings research. Cheers!

This is currently the best opening reference app on iPhone. I especially like the display of various branches of openings with percentages of their occurence and their names. I feel though the display window at the bottom is cramped and its hard to scroll the text with the finger there. Perhaps allowing landscape mode and getting this text on the side would help. Search feature would be nice too.

This is by far the best thing that I have found to improve my chess game. The ability to learn and diversify openings to gain a better understanding is key to improving your fame. With a very comprehensive AI to play against I can continually try out new things and view strategy from a logical perspective. This app is irreplaceable on my iPhone.

For a full paid app, Doesnt seem like its been fully tested yet. For example, when choosing an opening system in the opening database, sometimes you can choose one opening system and sometimes multiple ones. If you choose multiple ones just go out and then back in again and only the last one is selected. This is a very simple bug to fix butbis very confusing to the user. Other simple things like having the same opening multiple times in the recently used list also seems unpolished for example (put at top of list and remove others of the same). Also encountered other lists withe text on top of other text making it unreadable etc. Custom openings also has bugs in it. Pls address these issues otherwise a solid foundation with potential. Also a great feature to add would be ability to select multiple openings and then practice correct response against multiple openings!

Useful for many sorts of chess players. Adding a position search feature (among other things) that references openings that pass through the positions would be helpful to show transpositions. Attaching a basic "notable" games database for each opening would be good too, as would win/draw/loss stats for the openings.

It just crashed then asked me if I want to write a review! It often crashes just as the game is nearing the end. Also difficult to set a level to play against. If you set about my level it sometimes blunders and wrecks the game. Useful for learning openings though.

Great little tool! Thank you.

If you wanna learn your openings, this is perfect. My only issue is that it wish I could view it in landscape mode on my iPad Air. I hate using picture mode. I give five stars just for the program. I know theres no incentive to add landscape mode at this point, but the program is really useful.nah,mthey will add it.

After having looked for and tried several programs, this program comes out at the top of those I know for smartphones. I would have given it five stars had it been a package with a program such as Shredder or Fritz - but that it does not have but it is very good. It takes a bit to get used to it though. It does however have a lot of openings that can be chosen randomly as among the users favorites. This is very good. Yes, the program is a must for a serious chess player who relies on his smartphone.

It was a very useful app but now it cracks down all the time on iPhone 3G.

I fully recomend!

Thats good!

The Danish Gambit alone was worth the price of admission !

Update to my update! I love this app! Request - please add more Gambits! Ive decided to update my review -- when I bought it, it didnt have favorites or history review of openings, which are pretty handy. But hands down, the explorer mode that they added is amazing. It tells me what opening Im doing, and tells me all of the possibles branches I could take, with the opening names and next move to get me there. Pretty neat. I uppped my review to five stars. Good job developers! Pretty good, it has alot of openings Ive never heard of before. Im not familiar with alot of the openings, so its hard for me to find the opening by name since there are so many. I had to type in the first three moves before I found the opening I wanted. It only has one type of graphics for the pieces, so I took a star off my rating. If the developer reads this, please add more chess piece graphics!

The opening database is great, but... Hints always lead to loss Update: Thank you for the recent update. It no longer crashes from what Ive seen. Unfortunately it is still having an error when using the hint feature. Occasionally it will tell you take make an illegal/impossible move. Ive seen this in late game multiple times playing black. It will tell me to move the king to a space occupied/illegal. At this point it will only allow you to make a move for certain pieces. Thank you for the program. I look forward to further improvements.

Very limited in depth. I was very disappointed. Mostly useless for me.

Great app: easy to use, always improving with each update. Good database of openings. The chess engine for playing games after the opening is not particularly strong, but this is an openings app, and it helps me practice openings better than anything else Ive got (certainly than anything else on the iPad). For actually playing chess, there are other apps that are stronger, but theyre awkward to use to practice openings.

Easy to enjoy, play & lease from

Despite mediocre graphics and a clunky search menu, I really have enjoyed using this app. Im a beginner and this is an effective teaching tool at my level.