How I invented Puzzle Rush 10 years before Chess.com released it.

 It was in 2008 when I had finished my chess server WebChess X using open source code WebChess. I opened my chess server and found it was thriving but had a problem with some users cheating. I spent a few months in mid-2008 racking my brain as to how to solve the problem.I eventually came up with an idea. Why not create a test which randomly quizzes users with chess puzzles but make it time constrained and rated so I could validate that the ELO of the user was still consistent with the results they were getting.

So I wrote the code in PHP utilising my database of over 10 million chess positions. I also used some open source code called LT PGN VIEWER by Lutz Tautenhahn which had a guess-the-move app, problem board script. The app recognises FEN strings from pgn files of game fragments and matches the move played with the move string loaded. The app I built was simple it randomly selected a position and asked the user to play the winning move. It had to be just that move because their answer would reveal their ELO and whether they were human or a bot. The guess-the-move app had three guesses before it revealed the answer and I built that into my app as three strikes and the test stops or you run out of time, 3 strikes and you’re out, that was a unique feature as no chess puzzle app in the world had ever done this at the time. Another unique feature was adding the countdown timer and the flipping the board so that you solved the position from the right point of view of the player to move, believe it or not this was not standard, as the standard was to solve from the point of view of the white side even for puzzles with black to play, like newspaper puzzles or CT-ART and other puzzle apps were working at the time. Over the proceeding months I began refining the app. My original web app is still running on the web archive just in case anyone wants to have a look.

I created a Facebook page called Chess Club Live and would direct fans of my page to register on WebChess X.Then the unthinkable happened I closed my chess website WebChess X because maintaining and running it was taking so much time and there were better alternatives like Lichess, which was and still is just awesome.

However I decided to keep the cheat tester app as an independent app which I called at first Chess Gym, then later Chess Master Cube.



I had read a book by Michael de la Maza called Rapid Chess Improvement and it gave a detailed description of how a tactics trainer with graded puzzles could be solved in a schedule of increasing difficulty and that the improving player would take less time to solve them. At the same time there was a TV show called The Cube, where contestants were locked in a giant cube and physical and mental challenges were thrown at them with a countdown timer, hence the inspiration for the name and the challenging feel of the app.

I had various beta versions of the app but in late 2012 to early 2013 I published the app Chess Master Cube with 3 strikes and you’re out with a countdown timer from 5 second sessions to 5 minutes sessions. I had a Facebook page now of many thousands of fans and they loved it. They could post their scores on Facebook and top the leaderboard which was updated in real time. The Leaderboard was a big feature that was not so common at the time. The Chess Tactics Server did something similar but with average accuracy not absolute points scored in time trials which my app had and was the real breakthrough. The leaderboard was real-time and was ranked in descending point score but with the number of puzzles played and accuracy of play. I also built real time reports which displayed the overall estimated ELO performance and score as well as estimated ELO in tactical and strategic themes.

I began conversations with chess.com CEO where I told him about all my chess projects including Chess Master Cube which culminated in him offering a job to do “social” for him. He said he liked what I had done with Chess Club Live and he had struggled to pinpoint our products but he knew it was me that was the unique selling point, my talent. Flattered though I was I declined the job offer and kept promoting this early original Puzzle Rush.

I created more versions of it like ones which just quizzed you on the endgame or a specific opening, and even one version that was a timed guess the move for a specific game by Fischer, Kasparov, Tal or some other chess legend and calculated your ELO and kept a running score and real-time performance stats. I pioneered the chess skill area ELO rating which was another innovation in which the app kept categories of each puzzle and could give you a performance rating on your Endings by Endgame category, Middlegame by theme, also by Opening.

It grew in popularity as I kept promoting on my Facebook page Chess Club Live and posting messages to chess professional players and chess coaches to introduce them to the accelerated learning aspect of the app. I got mixed responses from people who complained about the apps graphics instead of its playability.

Many people have testifid to having improved significantly after using the app. At least one person used the app in the run up to a national chess championships and won the championships after training heavily with the app for months beforehand.

One example is Candidate Master, Joshua Altman who had previously won the Super Nationals that year used Chess Master Cube regularly said it improved his chess and helped him win in further chess competitions.







In 2018, I entered a customised version of my app to a PokerStars.com competition “My Chess Poker Game” organised by Jennifer Shahade for a new chess game/app co-sponsored by chess.com and judged by some of their staff, chess poker aces Liv Boeree and Daniel Negreanu. There was a chess.com staff member who judged my app then announced he had a new idea which would replace Chess but that he couldn’t say more until after the competition. Another chess.com staff judging the competition was Danny Rensch the COO (Chief Chess Officer) of Chess.com. What I find curious is I never got any feedback about my app from any of the judges and when I tweeted Danny he wouldn’t respond initially but then later tweeted the post below. 




I didn’t win the competition but chess.com produced Puzzle Rush after the competition and it worked the same way as my app. I was stunned.

I talked to the Chess.com CEO, Erik Allebest about it and he claimed not to know about my app and said the Puzzle Rush feature had been a long time in the making and not based on his knowledge of my app. Danny Rensch was unavailable for comment and blocked me on all social platforms. Again highly odd given he had judged my app and knew me over the years, we retweeted each other, and as co-founder of a chess community he would have known about my work in general, but all of a sudden would not communicate. I started feeling like I was being stonewalled.

So according to CEO Erik Allebest, Chess.com the world's biggest chess website had an idea to revamp their tactics trainer and were sitting on it for years not improving their website feature with this terrific idea until they judged a competition in which I presented the same features I had created 10 years earlier and then after the competition they released their version. We are supposed to believe that this is the real story of chess.com independently discovering Puzzle Rush after the same Puzzle Rush type app was widely known and being played for 10 years promoted by the world's biggest organic chess social network. Ok maybe, but it seemed like gaslighting and it didn’t add up to me but then I would think that…right? I started posting comparisons between the two apps and getting testimonies from my Chess Master Cube users who were also convinced I had created Puzzle Rush as it was strikingly similar.

Perhaps the real story is not that an idea created by me was taken without any regard for the intellectual property rights and copyright but how an app that was so addictive and powerful at improving chess performances was hidden for so long in plain sight and how chess.com translated a prototype version of it and brought it to light.

I invite you to decide, play Puzzle Rush and then play my app, Chess Master Cube.

Puzzle Rush: https://www.chess.com/puzzles/rush Chess Master Cube for Android Smart Phone:

Chess Master Cube https://twitter.com/chessmastercube 

I joined the Development team of a project called Chess Cup. A project of developers who wanted to work with me to create my original puzzle app using a better UI and ported to a better codebase. https://chesscup.org

A video of me showing an early version to my Facebook page fans on 3rd Feb 2013. https://fb.watch/6wrpVjBB63/

A short promotional video comparison of Chess Master Cube and Puzzle Rush 

https://zh-cn.facebook.com/ChessClubLive/videos/2402986026653946/

A video showing a new version in 2020 https://www.facebook.com/chessmastercube/videos/666050654024017

An internet archive snapshot entry showing the published website in 2012, six years before puzzle rush.

web.archive.org/web/20120825070515/http://webchessapps.agilityhoster.com:80/compwebchess2.1/liveboard/problemboard1_1.php

also another internet archive snapshot entry from 2012

web.archive.org/web/20121127192343/http://webchessapps.agilityhoster.com:80/compwebchess2.1/liveboard/problemboard1_1.php



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