Practice

#What Practice is

Practice turns the decisions in your analysed matches into flashcards. Each card is a position you faced: the board as you saw it, your side at the bottom, and the question you had to answer. Nothing else is shown until you answer: no cost, no tags and not the match it came from.

Practice is in the menu whether or not you are signed in. The number beside it is how many cards are due today. It has three tabs: Today, Decks and Saved.

#The questions

• A checker play offers up to five plays in shuffled order. By default they are a spread: the best one, the play made in the match, and one play from each size of error below the best, so the choice is between ideas, not between two near-identical moves. You can move the checkers on the board instead: a play that reaches one of the listed positions picks it. Keys 1 to 5 pick a play, and the same key again, Enter, Space or a click on the dice checks it. The other styles are the top five plays, the top four and the play made in the match, and playing it on the board with no list.
• Played on the board, you move the checkers and check the play once it is complete. A play that is not in the list is graded too: it is found among every play the analysis ranked, not only the ones listed. If the match's analysis did not rank it (an imported analysis keeps only a handful), your device analyses the position at your position-analysis depth and grades your play by that analysis, which the answer says.
• A cube decision asks "Should you double?" and then, for your opponent, "Take or pass?", one step at a time, from the same analysis. Answer with the board's own Roll, Double, Take and Pass buttons, or keys 1 and 2, which pick the buttons beside it in a fixed order. No double ends the question; after Double, the card is right only when both answers are. A wrong answer shows the right one. When the decision in the match was a take or a pass, only that half is asked.

A play is graded Best, Fine (it gives up less than 0.020, the size of an inaccuracy, or a tighter line you choose) or Wrong. Best and Fine both count as right. The answer then shows every option with what it costs, whether you chose what was played in the match, the position's tags, the match it came from and which analysis graded it, with the best play drawn in solid arrows and a wrong pick dashed. Same as match says you repeated the play you made over the board.

Positions with no real question in them are never drawn: a play where every reasonable move is within 0.020 of the best, a forced play, a cube decision whose actions are all that close, and resignations. They stay in Stats > Positions.

#How cards come back

The same position met in two matches is one card. A card you answer right moves up a box and comes back later: after 1, 3, 7, 21 and then 60 days. A wrong answer puts it back in the first box, due tomorrow. A right answer in the last box masters the card, and it leaves the rotation. Mark mastered does that at once, and Back into rotation undoes it.

Start on the Today tab draws the cards that are due, then new ones. To practise one match, choose Practise this match's mistakes on its analysis summary; on the match list, select matches and choose Practise mistakes. Retake wrong draws the cards you last got wrong. A session holds 5, 10, 25 or 50 questions, and Resume picks up an unfinished one. End session (or Escape) stops early. The scorecard at the end shows your score, the average cost, how often you repeated the play made in the match, and every question with its cost, its box and a Mastered switch. Today also shows the last seven days, and how long the cards due will take once you have answered enough for it to be measured.

#Settings

Below the decks on the Today tab:

#Decks

Every deck is a Positions filter. The built-in ones are My mistakes, Cube decisions, Checker errors, Opening, Middle game, Holding games, Race and Bear-off, each shown with a bar of how many of its cards you have mastered, are learning, last got wrong and have not seen, and how your last session of it went. Practise these on the Positions tab practises whatever that page is showing.

A deck whose name gives its answer away, such as Missed hits or Wrong takes, has only one answer if practised alone. It is practised mixed with positions on the same topic where the answer was different (for Missed hits, other positions where a hit was possible), so at most half the questions come from the deck itself.

#Saving positions

Any position can be kept, with or without a mistake in it. Saved positions live under Practice > Saved, and the same position saved twice (from two matches, say) is kept once.

• On Stats > Positions, open a position and click its star, or press S. A second S, or the … beside the star, opens its private note and its labels; Shift+S removes it again.
• In a match review, choose Save position from the board's menu, or press S (and Shift+S to remove it). This works on a match of yours that is saved to your account and analysed.
• In Study (Standard and Pro), choose Save position from the menu. The position is kept with the analysis on screen, so a position you pasted or built yourself can be practised too. A deeper analysis of it saved later replaces that one; a shallower one or another engine's never does.

A note is private: only you can read it, and it is kept apart from the notes on a match. Labels (Standard and Pro) are your match tags, so a label means the same on a position as on a match, and renaming or merging one does both. Practise later puts a position into today's practice without saving it.

Saved lists your positions with their notes and labels, how each was played where it came from, filtered by star, note, label or kind. Practise these practises them as a deck, and Show in Positions opens the same filter over the decisions of your matches, where the Saved or not picker narrows any filter to the positions you saved.

On Free you can star and note the decisions of your own matches. Labels, saving a position from Study and saved decks are part of Standard.

#Your own decks

On Standard and Pro there are two kinds:

• A smart deck is a filter. Save as preset on the Positions tab keeps the filter that page is showing under a name of your choice. It is listed under My presets on the Positions tab and as a smart deck on Practice > Decks, and it follows the filter as new matches are analysed.
• A deck of chosen positions is built by picking positions on the Positions tab. It holds those positions and nothing else, in your order, and is listed with your studies.

Remove on Practice > Decks deletes a deck after asking. Deleting a smart deck deletes only its filter. Deleting a deck of chosen positions deletes the study itself, with your notes on its positions, and takes it away from any student you shared it with. Neither can be undone. Your practice history belongs to the positions, so it stays either way.

A deck larger than one session asks the positions that are due first, then the ones you have not seen, then the rest.

#Practising a study

A study you keep on your account can be practised as it stands: choose Practise beside it on Practice > Decks, or open it in Study and choose Practise this study from its menu. Its starting positions are asked in the study's own order, each graded by the analysis the study holds for it, and nothing is mixed in or left out for being easy. A position the study has not analysed yet is left out, and the session says how many were.

#Practising on this device

Matches that live only in this browser (played or imported without an account, or never saved to it) can be practised too, signed in or not. Practice offers Start indexing the first time it finds them, and nothing leaves the device:

• Every decision of every analysed match is tagged, one match at a time while the app is idle.
• A match with no analysis yet is analysed first, with the engine in your browser at the depth set for analysing a match on this device, then tagged. This waits whenever a page needs the engine (Play, a match review, Study) and carries on from where it stopped when you leave it. An import that brought its own engine's analysis is used as it is.

Try 5 questions first tags only your newest analysed matches and starts a short session straight away.

While indexing runs, an Indexing count sits in the menu bar on every page but Play, and Practice and Stats show how far it has got, with a Pause button. The time left is this device's own: the speed it measured on Device speed until it has analysed a match here, then the speed it has just shown, and until there is either it says it is still working that out. On a laptop or phone running on battery, below a fifth of its charge, indexing pauses by itself; plug in, or press Resume to carry on anyway. In the match list a match whose decisions are counted shows indexed.

Cards from this device are kept on this device, answers and boxes included, and grade exactly as an account's cards do. Signed in, they are a section of their own, On this device, below your account's cards. Practising them needs a browser that keeps files for a site; one that does not is told so.

#Stats from this device

The same matches feed Stats: signed out it shows them, and signed in a switch beside the tabs reads Account or This device. The device's Overview has the error rates for you and your opponents, where the equity goes by error size, the cube decisions, the dice and your top topics; Topics and Positions work as they do for an account, and every count opens the positions behind it. Accuracy, your percentile, repeated mistakes and the trend over time are worked out on our servers and are not shown here. A topic is marked a weak spot only after this device has fetched every player's figures to compare you with, which it does whenever it is online.

#Saving on this device

The star on a practice card, and on a position in Positions, keeps the position on this device with a private note. They are listed under Practice > Saved, and practised from there as a deck. Labels need an account.

#Moving to your account

Signing in on a device you used signed out keeps what you did there: Practice offers to bring those matches, stars, notes and card progress into your account. On Standard and Pro they then move to the account itself, with a count of what has moved so far, and from then on they are on every device you sign in on. The same happens straight after upgrading. On Free they stay on this device, under your account.