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A topic to keep track of tips and tricks for the SOP board. Category Tip or trick General tips/tricks Hardware Battery charging Green light does not necessarily mean a full charge, check your app for your actual charge level Software (I will come in every so often and clean up the list, add new items that people leave so we have a tips and tricks page we can reference and point new people towards.)

Here are the times group members prefer to play games. In addition, here is a time zone converter I have been using for a while: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html Player Approx. Rating Time Zone Pref Days/Start Times @rsava 1275 EST (UTC -5) M-F 7:30pm; Sat 1:00pm; Sun 2-4pm @Nicke1Plate 1200 EST (UTC -5) M-F 6 to 7:30; Sun 2-4pm @RogueAI3160 1625 PST (UTC -8) Sat 2-5pm @jimbycat 1100 MST (UTC -7) M-F 9:30pm-11:30pm; Sat & Sun 1:00pm-5pm and 9:30pm-11:30pm @walastika 700 EST (UTC -5) Sun 4:00pm-10pm, every other Sat 4pm-10pm. @antidot9 1050 EET (UTC +2) @meetarnav GMT (UTC 0) Tues/Thur/Sat 20:00-22:00 @chanelno5x

Using Gerhard Kalab's excellent work (Chess Dojo app) I have now released the first version of my Square Off Pro driver: https://goneill.co.nz/chess.php#squareoff This will run in Arena, LucasChess and Shredder in Windows (version 10 or later), but not currently in Linux. I have sent it to Lucas for inclusion in LucasChess so I'm sure the next version (2.01b or 2.02 or...) will include it. It works slightly differently to my other drivers: You have to press OK on the New Game/Position screen before setting up the board Replacing pieces on take backs of capture moves is a bit different You must start a normal game on the board after first turning on its power before you can set up a custom position Please read the manual for more details. Let me know how it goes. Thanks!Graham

Hello everyone, After contacting the Square Off Pro technical support department, I received an email which is a generic response and they redirected me to their YouTube channel.I tell you that on your YouTube channel, I can't find the answer to what I need. ProblemWhen I play physically with my friends, I want to record the games for later, study the game with the computer and see the mistakes I have made. Can any of you tell me, how can I play with another person physically , he with white and I with black and have the electronic board record the plays? Thank you so much.

Online play is a valuable tool to prepare for OTB Tournaments, but I think face-to-face games are a powerful component to performing well in live tournament settings. Playing OTB draws on additional skills. That's where I think using SOP for live remote OTB play will help to gain a competitive edge over those who do not have OTB experience. For example, your "tactical vision' may be en pointe online, but OTB suffers. If chess meetups are not an option, SOP offers more flexibility so you can play when you're available. I tried a combination of chess club meetups, group coaching, and SOP, which bolstered my irl tournament results—I'm wondering if anyone else has tried something like this. Using SOP could help bridge the gap between your online level of play and OTB skills. Has this been the case for you?

So I got my PRO yesterday, got the SO app, connected the board to the app, connected to lichess (which I don't use), then I tried connecting to chess.com. The app says if you sign in with google, facebook, twitch, anything but directly signing into chess.com then it's not supported. Got on the live chat with SO, and they told me they don't support chess.com at all! I tell them I'm looking at the box that says it does, your app has the option to connect, all your ads say it works with either site....Long pause....."We'll get back to you" I probably just need to play with it some more, but I couldn't even get a live game through lichess or the SO app. Any help offered is greatly appreciated. I've been so excited for this and I'm pondering a return. I'm really glad I didn't get the auto move boards. At the very least it will record my OTB club games, but I had much higher hopes for it than just that. Thank you.

I really wish SquareOff would introduce a "pause & reset" functionality/feature for "Face to Face" mode. Lately I have been taking my SOP board to various chess clubs and playing against other club goers using the face to face feature that the SOP board offers. I always warn my new friends and opponents that you have to be careful to lift and place each piece when making your move. Despite the warnings and everyone's best attempt to follow that protocol, it almost goes without fail that eventually my OTB colleagues will forget they need to do this and they will start sliding the pieces. As we all know SOP hates sliders. Most of the time my opponents are able to get away with it (the board still reading their move) however, without fail, the board eventually bugs out and the lights will bug out. To which we try to quickly reset the board as the clock is still ticking, most the time not able to figure out how to reset it without it continually beeping at us, effectively wasting all effort in using the SOP face to face feature. It's such a mess. Perhaps I am not resetting the board properly, but I swear the board sometimes just does not allow you to fix the pieces. It's like it gets stuck blinking and beeping despite all efforts to correct the board pieces (replaying the move, resetting the pieces in different orders, etc) and then the clock just runs down and inevitably we convert to the low tech old school methods. My suggestion, in short: Either fix this bug that makes it so difficult to reset the pieces. Or just offer a way to pause the game and reset the pieces and continue. Anyone else having trouble with face to face mode? Edit: even if my opponents do remain careful throughout the game, while making a move, the magnetic pull of the pieces sometimes randomly repel or pull an untouched piece off of its square and we are left with the same limbo lights blinking/beeping outcome.

Hello all, my name is Richard, I live in Central Florida. I have lived here since before Disney World opened and have lived in my current home for 34 years with my wife of 35 years. Been playing chess off and on for about 50 years now (man, Bobby Fischer got so many of us interested in chess). I have only gotten serious in the last 10 years, really tried to improve in the last 5. I play both here and at Lichess (both user names are rsava). Looking forward to playing more games with the SOP, hopefully we can have a good group and have regular games, perhaps even a league. Cheers!

Hi, I've noticed a problem during gameplay that has happened at least twice and maybe others before I noticed. I'm playing the game on a Rapid/30min time and in this game (and perhaps the others) I was in a winning position and up significantly against the SQ engine then inexplicably all time taken for thinking, mine and the engine, was only decrementing on my clock. Is this a known bug? A searchable bug database would be helpful and perhaps cause less churn of questions, if that exists?

Going to post this in the three types of boards I won. Do any of these boards actually work with Chess.com? I have truly only gotten any of them to work with Lichess. So, for those of you using the SquareOff Pro on chess.com how are you doing it? Does it work well? I have had no luck at all using it here.

Hello everyone! I am waiting to receive my SOP and I wanted to know if the mobile charger works to charge the electronic board. I have written to the electronic board company but they do not respond, since I am asking them what characteristics the charger must have. I could also use an external battery, but I don't know the characteristics of the external battery that I have to buy. Can someone tell me what electrical characteristics the electronic board supports? All the best.

Checkout this video I made while learning the “K and H” endgame technique. Another reason why chess computers are great resource to improve your game: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1302196939 watch how I draw the AI twice after the 37 min mark in the video

Anyone know if I can use my SOP (should arrive this week) with a database/analysis program such as Hiarcs on Mac or iOS? I've seen that Hiarcs supports Millennium boards.

I know how to play from a custom position against the AI. I also know how to play OTB with another person and have it track our game. I can’t figure out how to play from a custom position with another person over the board. When I play my kids, sometimes I’ll use a piece or pieces handicap. It would be nice if we could still use the SOP for that.

Has anybody just had the board constantly beep at you after using the move back feature? I played a terrible move and used the “move back” which seems to work, however after moving the pieces back it would not let me make anymore moves. It just kept beeping at me.

This happens constantly… anytime I castle the AI opponent gets stuck thinking until it times out. Is there a special movement for castling ? Am I doing it wrong?I pick up the king… then pick up the rook, then place teh king, then place the rook.then the lights stay ON around the rook, although it doesn’t beep at me… I then have to move another piece to force an error beep… then the AI just thinks until time runs out.

We can use this topic for SOP issues. I will collect and submit to SO on a regular basis and update when they reply. Feel free to add general issues you are having. 5-Jan-2022 Wifi connectivity is not clear whether the board is connected.

@Nicke1Plate and I scheduled a game on Sunday, 26-Dec to try out the SOP. We had a few issues getting connected/playing the game (all issues submitted to SquareOff): 1. We wanted to play a 30|30 game but in the chess.com interface in the app there is no option to even set that up. Very unfortunate as that is a very common time control. Since chess.com really allows you to set any time control, SOP should do the same. On the first try we connected fine and the board registered Nicke1Plate's first move. It would not register my reply. Nothing I tried would do it. This led to the second issue: 2. I tried to abort the game and it would not abort it. The only way I could get out was to force quit the app. So I got back in, tried to start another game with him but no luck. I did manage to start a game - somehow - with the computer even though I was trying to start an online game. We chatted back and forth to try and start something, I tried several devices (iPads and iPhones) and nothing seemed to work. Finally, Nicke1Plate started one on the SquareOff server. That was successful although not ideal. I would prefer to play on the chess.com server (I must try a Lichess game to compare) so I do not need to import the games after playing. The game went along fine, he was white, I was black. The board worked well. But I glanced over at my phone when he was on the clock to see how much time I had left and that led to issue 3: 3. When black is off the clock, the timer is a faint, darkish grey - on a black background - which is very hard to see. I had to pick up my phone to actually see what my time left was. I did this a few times and one of those times he moved while I was looking so I had to waste time putting the phone back down to move his piece. We played on and we finally reached this position: And that is when I decided to resign. (Like I said, he cleaned my clock.) So I clicked on the spot for the resign option (which for some reason looks like the power on/off symbol) which led to issue 4: 4. I touched "Resign". The noise sounded and went back to the board with me still on the clock. So, I tried again - same result. I again had to force quit the app to get out of the game. Very frustrating. I have played a few games online, just random, and had none of these issues, so it will be interesting to see if the issues continue with other SOP users and not with just random games which I assume are not SOP users. Overall the starting experience was slightly below average; we started playing and it went to slightly above average. The clock thing was annoying. Hopefully more experience will make for a better game play in the future. Cheers!

Not a novel idea, but I glued disc magnets after peeling off the felt then re-felted the pieces so now they can work with the Square Off Pro. Some tips I learned while working on them: Try to find the biggest disc magnet that will fit flush or slightly smaller diameter than the base of the piece. If it's too small, the piece can wobble and has to be placed as close to the center of the square for the board to detect it. This won't be a problem if you plan on installing the magnets inside the piece itself versus just easily gluing them on the bottom. Hindsight, I wish I spray painted the magnets black so the edges wouldn't be so shiny and contrast to the piece and felt. For this particular set, here are the sizes of magnets and felt pads I went for: Piece Magnet Felt King 1.25" 1.50" Queen 1.25" 1.50" Bishop/Rook/Knight 1.25" 1.25" Pawn 1.00" 1.00" Chess House Inspiration set King height: 3.75" King base: 1.625" King weight: 2.5oz Set weight: 3 lbs 1x1/32" Neodymium Rare Earth Disc Magnets 1.25x1/32" Neodymium Rare Earth Disc Magnets