How To Learn Chess Coordinates

You're likely already familiar with the coordinate trainer. If you're from chess.com, the coordinate trainer there has a couple of disadvantages -- you can't turn off the clock, and you can't exclusively drill a selection of squares. That's exactly what I'm going to suggest -- use the lichess coordinate trainer with the timer disabled and with only the center four squares selected. Then, when prompted with a coordinate, close your eyes and ask yourself the square color and where the square is. After making your best guess, open your eyes and then click your chosen square. If you got it wrong, mindfully observe the true square color and position, click it, and then continue. Once you get a firm grasp of the center four squares, expand the selection outwards so that the center 16 squares are selected.

Repeat that process until you've learned those center squares. If I remember right, it took me a few hundred repetitions. That's where I stopped, because it was getting pretty tedious by then, even for me. After that, you should have a pretty strong foundation, enough to infer square color and position for any other square on the board, not just those you've drilled. Most importantly, it should now be easier to read coordinates from chess books.

On that note, I'm going to argue that chess puzzle books are better than than online puzzles because they have annotations and are hand picked by human experts, whereas algorithmically generated chess puzzles are just that -- bulk generated according to a formula. Sometimes you see chess masters look at an online chess puzzle and say something like "this puzzle is ridiculous". That's why.

This is probably a pretty good way to learn chess coordinates, since Simon Williams advocates learning the color of the square in this blog post.