About ChessWoodie

ChessWoodie was built by Tigran, software engineering manager at Adobe and a chess player who has loved the game since childhood. He never pursued it professionally, but chess has been a constant in his life. He currently plays at around 2300 on Chess.com, a level that takes years of serious training to reach and maintain.

A few years ago he picked up The Woodpecker Method by GM Axel Smith and GM Hans Tikkanen and started doing it with pen and paper. He would time his sessions manually, log his success rate by hand, and track which puzzles he had missed across cycles. It worked. The improvement showed up in his games.

But the overhead competed with the training. To Tigran the method had always been an engineering problem as much as a chess one: repetition until recognition becomes automatic, measurable progress across cycles, a feedback loop that tells you whether the training is working. He knew how to build that. So he did.

ChessWoodie automates everything the pen and paper required: cycle structure managed automatically, progress tracked across every cycle, mistakes logged and reviewable after every session, and Stockfish analysis on the positions you got wrong so you understand why, not just that you did.

ChessWoodie started as a personal tool. Then his son Aram started using it. Aram is 8 years old and gets one hour of screen time a day. He spends part of it on ChessWoodie, solving puzzles instead of playing Roblox. Tigran did not ask him to. He just kept coming back.

That told Tigran something real about whether what he had built was worth sharing.

Tigran works full time as an engineering manager at Adobe. ChessWoodie gets built after work, most nights until 2 or 3 in the morning. Every feature, every design decision, every line of code has been written around a real training need, not a product roadmap drawn up in a meeting room.

When you use ChessWoodie, you are using something built by someone who trains the way you train, cares about the same improvements you care about, and has put in the kind of hours that only make sense if you genuinely believe in what you are building.

Most chess tactics training emphasizes novelty. You solve a position once, move on, and rarely see it again. That approach can improve calculation, but it often fails to build the kind of intuition needed in real games, where there is no time to calculate everything from scratch.

Strong players recognise tactical patterns quickly because they have seen similar positions many times before. By solving the same puzzles across multiple cycles, the tactical ideas become easier to identify, and you stop calculating them, you start seeing them. That is what transfers to real games under time pressure.

ChessWoodie was built to make repetition intentional, structured, and measurable. Removing the pen and paper. Keeping everything that made the method work.

• Pattern recognition matters more than novelty
• Speed is as important as correctness
• Feedback should be immediate and understandable
• Progress should be visible, not guessed

Every feature in ChessWoodie exists to support these principles.