Woodpecker Method: the cycles, and a free online trainer

It is a training method from the book The Woodpecker Method by Swedish grandmasters Axel Smith and Hans Tikkanen, published by Quality Chess in 2018. Tikkanen worked the method out in 2010, while still an international master, and went on to earn his grandmaster norms; the book is the method plus the material to run it on: 1,128 puzzles from the games of world champions, sorted into easy, intermediate and advanced.

The idea underneath is older than the book. Strong players do not calculate their way to a knight fork; they see it, because they have seen that shape hundreds of times before. The method manufactures that experience on purpose. Instead of a stream of puzzles you will never meet again, it gives you one book and makes you go through it so often that its patterns become reflexes.

The name is the repetition: a woodpecker hits the same spot of the same tree until it is through.

Everything in the method is a cycle: the whole set of puzzles, once, in order.

• Cycle 1 takes as long as it takes. The book's pace is four weeks for all 1,128, which is about forty puzzles a day. Solve each one properly: find the move, and the line behind it.
• Cycle 2 is the same set in half the time of cycle 1. Two weeks, if the first took four.
• Every cycle after that halves again: one week, then three or four days, then two, then one.
• You stop after seven cycles, or when you can solve the whole set in a single day.

Take a short break between cycles (a day is enough), because a tired brain learns patterns badly. Keep the order the same from cycle to cycle, and when you get a puzzle wrong, look at the solution before moving on: a pattern you never saw completed is not a pattern you have learned.

The halving is what makes it the Woodpecker Method rather than just doing puzzles twice. The second cycle feels too fast, and it is supposed to: the only way to solve three hundred puzzles in a week that took you a fortnight is to stop calculating the ones you now simply know.

The honest objection, raised on every forum thread about the method, is that by the third cycle you are remembering answers, not finding them. That is true, and it is the point. What you remember is not "puzzle 214 is Nd6+" but what a position looks like when a knight fork is on: the king and the rook on squares a knight can reach together, the check that forces the matter. That is the thing a player misses in a game, and it is recognition, not calculation.

The diagram is the kind of shape the method drills. The first time, you count the squares. By the fifth cycle you do not count anything: the king on e8 and the rook on b7 are one picture, and the knight's square is in it.

What the method does not train is long calculation in positions you have never seen. Pair it with fresh puzzles at your rating and with the positions from your own games, which the scan finds: the Woodpecker set gives you the patterns, the rest gives you the practice of finding them cold.

The book's 1,128 is sized for strong club players with a month to spend. For most people it is the reason the method gets abandoned in week two. What matters is not the number but three properties of the set:

• Mostly easy for you. A Woodpecker set is meant to be solved, and solved fast by the fourth cycle. Most of it should sit a little below your puzzle rating, with a sliver above it to stretch you. Puzzles you cannot solve at all teach you nothing on the second pass either.
• Short lines. One to four moves. A nine-move combination is recited by the fifth cycle, not recognised.
• Varied. Forks, pins, back-rank mates, deflections, discovered attacks: a set that is all one motif trains you to expect it.

A practical start: 100 puzzles if you are new to serious training, 300 if you do puzzles most days, 600 if you have a month and a habit. A first cycle of 300 at forty a day is a week, which makes the whole method a month and a half.

You do not need the book to follow the method; you need a fixed set, a way to go through it in order, and a count of how long each cycle took. The book's own material is sold as a paper book and as an interactive course on Chessable, and many players use it that way.

Lichess has no cycle feature, so Lichess players build the set themselves, usually as studies, and keep the dates in a spreadsheet. The puzzles in the Lichess database are free to reuse, and that is what chesstactics does for you: pick a size and it builds the deck from Lichess puzzles around your rating, easy to hard like the book, then counts every cycle: the days it took, how many you solved first time, the time spent on the board, and sets the next cycle's target at half the last one.

The first cycle is free. The halving cycles after it are part of Pro, and the puzzles in your deck stay yours to play either way.

chesstactics is not affiliated with or endorsed by Quality Chess, Chess.com, Chessable or the book's authors. The Woodpecker Method is a trademark of its respective owners; it is named here only to describe the training method.