Chess Opening Lab (1400-2000) Reviews

So far so good

Mvemo

Just started using and find it easy to use. Having animated moves is great. Love the quizzes that demonstrate the replies to incorrect answers and give hints as to the correct thought pattern while still not revealing the correct answer fully.

Middlegame Lab

Cid Hamete Benengeli

As far as I can tell, no Chess King software actually teaches openings or explains the ideas/strategy behind them. Their apps (and PC software) automatically play through 10-15 moves and then ask you for a best move or two, and then automatically play through several more moves and tell you that you've completed an exercise. They also group exercises alphabetically by the openings' and variations' names (except for "Rare Variations," which for some reason is at the very top of the list) rather than by moves or even commonality, presumably assuming that everyone who uses their opening app already knows the openings. Woe to the beginner who downloads this app and learns the Hungarian opening before the Ruy Lopez. Plus, Chess Kings's interface (common across all their software) is also terrible; it shows you refutations and variations, which is great, but you can't skip them or save them for later, and there are so many of them that they distract from the main line of the exercise; and it seems like if you're making enough wrong moves that this becomes a problem, the last thing you need is constant interruption. And you have no way to replay the exercise from the beginning so that you can review, so you move to the next exercise without even really knowing what you yourself did in the previous one.