Even at the beginning level, many chess players pick up the excellent habit of looking for undefended pieces. It is less common for young players to notice what I call 'underdefended' enemy pieces - those which are only being protected as many times as they are being attacked. Just like undefended pieces, underdefended (or badly defended, if you prefer) pieces contain the seeds of tactics for the opponent.
I wanted to share an interesting position from the PanAmerican Intercollegiate Chess Championships. The game was played between National Master Adarsh Hullahalli from the University of Texas at Austin and Grandmaster Nicolas Checa from Yale.
Solving exercises from books is one of the best ways to train the skill of finding the best move. But for many children, consistent book work may not be as realistic as solving problems on the computer. Fair enough! This is why Alex and I have meticulously entered Steps problems into chessbase, to be able to assign them on our online platform as HW. New Steps classes start this coming week - all the information is here: https://masterchess.org/collections/all There are other electronic resources I wanted to draw to your attention as well. Chessity is a website I have used with my own students for many years. I think I was the first mass adopter among American coaches. I remember my contact...
Parents - don’t worry if you don’t have any chess experience. All you need to play with your child is some basic rules! Here is one mini-game you can play with only knowledge of the knight move. Because the knight is (by far) the trickiest piece, this is great practice for kids.
There are some positions where the attacker can choose what piece he will capture with first - those are more straightforward. In the more challenging cases, only one order of capturing is correct!
