Last updated on November 29th, 2025 at 09:47 am
Chess Opening Lab (1400-2000) – Education Game Review
Chess Opening Lab (1400-2000) is a Education/Board/Puzzle game from CHESSQUEEN INC, first launched in 9th September 2016.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 579+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Chess Opening Lab (1400-2000) Stand Out
This is a perfect opening manual. It features a theoretical review of all the chess openings, which are illustrated by instructive games of the greatest chess players. This compact opening manual contains a detailed classification, which makes it useful to players of any level – beginners, intermediate and advanced players. Each opening variation is supplied with evaluations and characteristics of key moves. The history of the variations' development is described, as well as their current status. The theoretic material is nicely illustrated by classic games with detailed annotations that demonstrate the principal ideas and plans of each variation for White and Black. There is also a special training section with more than 350 exercises of various difficulty on more than 40 openings.
This course is in the series Chess King Learn, which is an unprecedented chess teaching method. In the series are included courses in tactics, strategy, openings, middle game, and endgame, split by levels from beginners to experienced players, and even professional players.
With the help of this course, you can improve your chess knowledge, learn new tactical tricks and combinations, and consolidate the acquired knowledge into practice.
The program acts as a coach who gives tasks to solve and helps to solve them if you get stuck. It will give you hints, explanations and show you even striking refutation of the mistakes you might make.
The program also contains a theoretical section, which explains the methods of the game in a certain stage of the game, based on actual examples. The theory is presented in an interactive way, which means you can not only read the text of the lessons, but also to make moves on the board and work out unclear moves on the board.
Advantages of the program:
• High quality examples, all double-checked for correctness
• You need to enter all key moves, required by the teacher
• Different levels of complexity of the tasks
• Various goals, which need to be reached in the problems
• The program gives hint if an error is made
• For typical mistaken moves, the refutation is shown
• You can play out any position of the tasks against the computer
• Interactive theoretical lessons
• Structured table of contents
• The program monitors the change in the rating (ELO) of the player during the learning process
• Test mode with flexible settings
• Possibility to bookmark favorite exercises
• The application is adapted to the bigger screen of a tablet
• The application does not require an internet connection
The course includes a free part, in which you can test the program. Lessons offered in the free version is fully functional. They allow you to test the application in real world conditions before releasing the following topics:
- Rare variations
1.1. 1. g3, 1. b4, ..
1.2. 1. b3
1.3. 1. d4
1.4. 1. d4 Nf6
1.5. 1. d4 Nf6 2. Nf3 - Alekhine's defense
- Benoni defense
- Bird's opening
- Bishop's opening
- Blumenfeld counter-gambit
- Bogo-Indian defense
- Budapest gambit
- Caro-Kann
- Catalan system
- Center gambit
- Dutch defense
12.1. Dutch defense
12.2. Ilyin-Genevsky system
12.3. Leningrad system
12.4. Staunton gambit
12.5. Stonewall variation - English opening
- Evans gambit
- Four knights' game
- French defense
16.1. French defense - Grünfeld defense
- Italian game & Hungarian defense
- King's Indian defense
- Latvian gambit
- Nimzo-Indian defense
- Nimzowitsch defense
- Old Indian defense
- Philidor's defense
- Pirc-Robatsch defense
- Queen's gambit
- Queen's Indian defense
- Queen's pawn game
- Reti opening
- Petrov's defense
- Ruy Lopez
- Scandinavian defense
- Scotch gambit & Ponziani's opening
- Scotch game
- Sicilian defense
- Three knights' game
- Two knights' defense
- Vienna game
- Volga-Benko gambit
- The complete course of openings
This Education game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Chess Opening Lab (1400-2000) is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 15th January 2018
Recent improvements include:
This app has been updated by Apple to display the Apple Watch app icon.
• App is updated for iPhone X
• New home screen
• Renaming of account
• Various fixes and improvements
Download & Availability
Chess Opening Lab (1400-2000) is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Chess Opening Lab (1400-2000) on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
Its a really good app. Ive learned a lot so far about how openings work.we just wish there were more examples of the opening systems. We rather like the Leningrad Dutch and want to learn more about it but you give only one example (sic) that said, the example given is very powerful. It would be great to give 20 or more examples of the different openings if at all possible. After studying some of the examples we were blasting our opponents of the board! The interface/ layout and idea/ concept are very good and easy to follow. We just need more examples/ exercises of them. Cheers.
The program has truly assisted us to improve our game. Great app.
We really thought this would be just another tactics program, but it has some excellent teaching methods and quality chess opening scenarios.
We have had to buy full course three times because there is no log in and it seems to forget conveniently Recent opening version is awful relative to chess base It misses multiple important variations and openings ( eg no London System) Not sure how the teaching is any better.
It has nothing to do with opening. It all about tactics. Scammers. We will report this scam to apple. It just like other CT tactics. Do not fall for it folks.
As far as we 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.
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.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.2
- Size: 44.71 MB
- iOS: 8.0 or later
- Languages: EN, RU
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: [CHESSQUEEN INC]()
Last updated: 15th January 2018 | Genre: Education, Board | Developer: CHESSQUEEN INC