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Try These Chess Handicap Drills

Using the Lichess board editor and FEN codes

kit_carmelite
Getting Into Chess
Published in
10 min readJan 18, 2025

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Shows Lichess Board Editor with a drill position with White to play in starting position. Black has no pawns, only the king, knight bishop and rook.
Screenshot by author

My coach and I have been playing games in which he gives me a significant handicap. I have all my pieces and pawns. He has all his pawns and only king-side pieces. We’ve been playing 5+0 Blitz, and he still beats me. When we changed it to 10+0, I beat him playing White. He says I play like a tiger with White and like a kitten with Black. Before we tried this, he wanted to see if I could checkmate him when he had only his king. It took two tries to accomplish it, but it gave me a great training idea.

Using Lichess, I create a variety of positions where I attempt to mate the opponent (Stockfish at the highest level) with no time limit. My goal is to achieve at least three checkmates as both White and Black in each position. I created a separate Lichess account for this because it records all of these games as “Position” and I didn’t want it mixed up with my regular games. I do this on my Android tablet, which looks different than the desktop version.

Get the FEN codes

To streamline this process, it helps to copy and paste the FEN codes for each position into a text file. I play each combination of pieces as both White and Black. The FEN codes are different. Using my Android tablet, I…

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Getting Into Chess
Getting Into Chess

Published in Getting Into Chess

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kit_carmelite
kit_carmelite

Written by kit_carmelite

Married 25 years. Retired SAS programmer from Statistics Canada. Member of Secular Order of Discalced Carmelites since 2008. Love chess..

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