Remove blindspots with move counting game

This post introduces an open source mini-game that shows you a position, and asks you to count how many moves of various types there are (e.g. checks and captures for each side). Here's the link:

https://bescoto.github.io/chess-count-quiz/

Why?

Why could this be useful? I was having a conversation on Lichess on practice techniques, and I was complaining about my inability to find the simplest moves, despite playing chess regularly for almost 2 years:

For instance, today during a puzzle storm I spent 50 sec trying to solve a 1000-level puzzle before giving up, and the answer was just a simple knight fork, with nothing tricky about it.

How did I overlook such a simple move? Part of it could be my age (late 40s), but I thought there had to be some other reason. Lichess user GnocchiPup had a brilliant reply about his own blindspots:

I traced the root cause of my blind spot. The main one is that I'm just not looking. What usually happens because I played so many online fast games is that my brain tried to do thought process shortcuts. The worst of which is the first thing I do when it's my move or for puzzles is I immediately look into a good looking move without looking at all my available moves first. And then I watched a couple of YouTube videos of a guy playing chess with an eye tracker and Nakamura also doing the same. Watching the guy was painful. You might want to look for it. The best part was when he was so focused on h4 h5 spot, his eyes just wasn't moving around the board. And then I thought, lol, that's also how I play.

So I thought of an exercise which would force me to look at all my moves first. What else, but legal move counting? I have to admit to myself I needed to go back to square one, as if I don't know how to play chess.

At this point my lichess is 1900 and chesscom puzzle rush is 32. Then I did 100 positions of legal move counting. Discovered I had a lot of various blind spots. Moves that my brain automatically blocked, I literally thought the moves didn't exist.

After doing this, that's when I made my breakthroughs. 33 to 34 puzzle rush. Getting to 30+ puzzle rush also became normal. Current record is 42. That's also when I got to 2k lichess for all time controls.

His post made me realize I had the same problem, and I also had to admit to myself that I didn't know how the pieces move or how to think, despite two years trying to learn chess.

Turning his idea into a mini-game

GnocchiPup's suggestion was counting the total number of legal moves in a position. I plan to add this feature to my minigame, but the current version just asks the user to count how many checks and captures there are. After all, beginners are always told to consider checks and captures first. This obviously requires knowing what the checks and captures are!

It also adds a clock and score counter to gamify it and make it a bit more addictive :) Not everyone likes the clock, so I plan on making it optional later.

Thanks

Anyway, click the link above if you feel like trying it out. Let me know if you have comments or suggestions.

Thanks to GnocchiPup for his insight, and Lichess for a great website!