How do you Teach Chess?

Recently my 9-year-old son wanted to join the chess club at school. This is popular enough that the school limits it to 3rd through 5th graders and has a drawing from interested students to determine who actually gets to participate in the club that meets after school each Monday. As luck would have it, my son got in. This constitutes a larger problem. How do I best teach him how to play?

I’m not talking about the basics. I long ago taught him the basics such as how the board is set up, how each piece moves, the objective of the game, board etiquette, etc. But that is as far as anyone ever taught me… And really that is as much as I have taught him. In the past I would play him, toy with him for a while, string him along, and then of course crush him because I will NEVER voluntarily loose at chess! But now, he will be playing other people and I want him to at least be competitive if not realize my dream for him to be the next Bobby Fisher (without the hold the world in contempt and celebrate 9/11 wackiness of the original). As the youngest of 8 siblings I loved to play against them, even when they would fool’s checkmate me in 4 moves (Oliver, over, and over, and over…). It took me probably close to a year to learn how to recognize that and another one to learn how to take action to prevent it. It is one thing to loose repeatedly to family, I don’t want my son to loose at school and loose interest.

I didn’t want to start too complicated, somehow I don’t think training him in the Spasky Defense is the right approach… yet. So, I boiled down the game to what I thought were three key concepts and rules for success. I will walk you through each one. Tell me if I hit the right ones. By "right" I mean most fundamental and likely to lead to success both immediately and down the road. Tell me if you have other ideas or suggestions. These are not in any particular order other than my son now refers to these collectively as CTP: Center of the Board, Trade-up, and Protection.

Center of the Board – There is an area of 16 squares 4x4 in the middle of the board that is fundamental to the strategic positioning of the game. The more of this area that you control the better off you are. It will be easier to generate angles, extend your defense, solidly probe on offence and give you the breathing room to move your back line around. This is accomplished by pushing middle pawns out aggressively, bringing the knights out early, and can then be supported by bringing the bishops out to generate more angles.

Trade-up – This is nothing more than assigning value to the pieces and following the general rule of sacrificing a piece if it means you can capture one of greater value. My value scale goes pawn-knight-bishop-rook-queen-king. I know people switch the bishop and knight. I have no problem with that, it really goes to your tendencies and ability to use each effectively. Teaching my son that trading a rook for a pawn is not a good idea has proven to be harder than you would think…

Protection – This is probably the most basic element of the game but probably the most widely overlooked aspect of beginners. I think instinct works on the base level of "am I going to get killed by moving here" but beyond that, the concept of protection must be learned. By protection I mean who is guarding who? Who is and isn’t guarded? Who is this piece guarding that may or may not be guarded if I move? How many pieces are guarding a particular square? As you advance it becomes "where is the opponent lacking protection?" and "how can I get around or breakdown their protection."

There are other concepts such as forking, opening moves, trading once you have a lead, end-game, avoiding or playing for stalemate, trading-down or trading-even for position, etc., that are all important to improving your game, but I thought these three laid the best foundation. What do you think?

As for initial results, he had his first club meeting and played three games. He won 2 out of the 3. I’ll take that, …for now. Of course it probably has more to do with his analytical abilities than my coaching, but don’t tell him that!