SmallChess Pro

Very useful chess app, one of only a couple that I turn to. The second mini analysis board is particularly awesome. My reason for not giving 5 stars? When loading a PGN with multiple games, there doesn’t appear to be a simple way to load the next game in the series with a simple tap. In my case, when following along with a book and a PGN with say 300 games within the file, it becomes hugely inefficient having to push load and manually scrolling to find the next game. If the developers are reading this review, please add this functionality or tell me if I am missing a simple way to accomplish this.

Interface - superior, wishing its cousin SmallFish had this interface. Easy to learn and play. Board/Piece appearance choices are wonderful too. Chess Engine - definitely extraordinarily strong (but level modifiable if desired) only exceeded by the chess apps with the powerful Stockfish 11 chess engine. Play Analysis - To help itself it has an extensive opening “book”of the best moves, its interface can show multiple suggested moves with their game value, it can show a SUPER graph of the games’ progress move by move. My Wish List - it has an endgame table of best moves but relatively small compared to the Syzygy tables that can be purchased and used by its cousin, SmallFish. A significant analysis improvement not available to SmallChess. Importing PGN game files needs strengthening and its related database to organize stored games is FAR weaker than the “database champion” Chess Studio.

In an otherwise excellent program, I found one curious failure. It absolutely refuses to underpromote a pawn. It recognizes and accepts an underpromotion by its opponent and it shows an underpromotion in its own analysis if that is its best line of play. But when it makes its actual move, it will only promote to a queen....even if promoting to queen leads to an immediate loss and promoting to knight leads to an immediate win, it will still promote to a queen. Its analysis will show the win with the knight but the actual move it makes will be the queen.

There are several great chess apps for the iPhone and iPads. This is one of them. While the other great ones might be stronger (and some are, such as Stockfish), SmallFish has one feature that is superior to all the others: the set-up feature. On all the other great chess apps, trying to set up a position is frustratingly futile. (After carefully setting up a few pieces, they disappear from the squares, or the set-up mechanism quits before the set-up is completed.) In short, I like this app a lot. If future updates make it stronger, all the better.

This is an amazing chess app! Don’t be fooled by its simple appearance (which actually looks very clean and functional). It can paste PGN’s from the clipboard (you need to find them under the game menu, load game, my imports ...). Its analysis functions are unmatched. The analysis line brings up a small chessboard and you can visualize the line. It supports variations. It even has a variation board. It is quite a complex package for the iPad. If you like chess and want to play on the iPad, I highly recommend the pro version of this app. It even has a decent FICS client!