Chess apps on iPad are nowhere near PC standards – but you can still learn a thing or two
White to move.
RB In the film and television industries the iPad is much used and much loved. During script meetings we discuss and annotate the documents not on paper but on screen. It's the same with the actors' auditions and the location managers' photos. And we watch edits and even whole cuts on our iPads. But in the chess world there is much less enthusiasm for the iPad, which at first glance is surprising, given the ubiquity of computers in the modern game.
I have a number of chess apps on my iPad, and it has to be said none of them comes near to the standard of those on my PC. Shredder is my favourite, even though the iPad app is nothing like as sophisticated as its laptop counterpart. There is also an online database app from Chessbase. Chessbase is for me the gold standard of chess software, but their iPad app has almost no functionality. You might as well log on to chessgames.com and search for games there.
The app I use most is Tactic Trainer. This gives you positions to solve, most of them fairly basic one or two move combinations, but once again there is almost no functionality. On the plus side it does give you a very generous ELO rating. I got mine up to 1920 but then my friend Jools came to stay and my ELO promptly fell to 1850, which is, sadly, far more realistic.
I found today's position on Tactic Trainer and was amazed to see it come up six times in my database. It occurs on move 19 of a line in the Italian Game. The highest rated players I came across were Mirkovic (2355)–Scekic (2265), Kladovo 1994. White plays 19 Be2, and there is no defence against the check on h5 with mate or massive material loss to follow. Mirkovic-Scekic continued: 19…Rh8 20 Bh5+ Kf8 21 Rf6+, and Black resigned.
The irony of writing here about chess and the iPad is of course that because the iPad doesn't support Flashplayer, those of you reading this on your tablet won't be able to see the position. chess@guardian.co.uk
• This article was corrected on Tuesday 12 July 2011. An editing error in paragraph four had made Kladovo a third player in the match.
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