Balancing the difficulty of chess puzzles

Wether you are solving chess puzzles just for fun, or learning chess tactics to get better at chess, there is always a fine balance regarding the difficulty of the puzzles.
If the puzzles are too easy, you can get bored.
If the puzzles are too hard, you can get frustrated.

When solving puzzles on ChessPuzzle.net in standard practice mode, you automatically get a rating assigned, and solve puzzles corresponding to your rating.
In Puzzle Climb, you get puzzles that are increasingly difficult, and you have to be careful as you lose the game when you get three of them wrong. So even solving the easy puzzles at the beginning is exciting.

When you start playing Puzzle Academy, you solve puzzles that require fundamental skills, such as capturing pieces, and escaping from check.
These puzzles are great for beginners, but Puzzle Academy is targeted at players from beginner to advanced level, at least up to a rating of 2000.
During the beta test, Puzzle Academy has become more and more comprehensive, and starting with fundamental puzzles can be a boring grind for advcanced players.

Introducing Puzzle Academy quick start

Now when starting Puzzle Academy, you can select your rating.
This can be a FIDE rating, a national rating, or a rating from an online playing site.
If you already solved puzzles on ChessPuzzle.net previously, you can also use that rating.

Based on the selected rating, Puzzle Academy suggests a list of skills to unlock, or skip.
You can review that list. If you are happy the list does not include too advanced skills, you can proceed and start with the suggested skill set.

The list of suggested skills per rating is based on the experience from the Puzzle Academy beta test, the ratings of the puzzles, and the skill tree.

If you have already started playing Puzzle Academy, and you find your current set of puzzles too easy, you can still use this feature after starting.
Select "Unlock skills based on your rating" in the "Acquire new skills" panel on the dashboard.

Fast mastery

Mastering a skill has also been updated to allow faster mastery of skills that are easy for you.

Previously, a score of 15 out of 20 was required for mastery of a skill.

Now if you start a new skill, and solve almost all the puzzles correctly, mastery can be awarded faster, for example when you solve all of the first ten puzzles correctly.

Thank you

I'm really happy with the Puzzle Academy quick start.
Thanks to everyone participating in the beta test, you made this possible.

Become a ChessPuzzle.net Premium Member and start personalized learning with Puzzle Academy

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Future development and your feedback

Development on Puzzle Academy continues.
As always your feedback is important and welcome, please contact me if you have any questions or suggestions.