Teaching Tactics

It's always fun and rewarding teaching kids tactics, or as I prefer to call them, tricks. Teaching kids the patterns and then seeing their sense of achievement when they employ a tactical operation in one of their games is great. This term I'm showing a load of games and positions from tactical masterpieces, with a particular emphasis on teaching kids to recognise the basic tactical themes of pins, forks, discovered attacks and skewers. Of course, there will be many other things happening in the games, but it is important that young children recognise the basic patterns best of all, with an idea to employ them properly, and defend against them as well.

This week Paul Morphy takes the limelight, so I thought I'd throw some positions on here. I'm not going to be showing every position to the kids that I put up here, there were just too many to choose from.

So, Monday's move...well, actually Morphy played this game blindfold, so maybe I should just put the moves up, and give you all the chance to try to work out Morphy's move, blindfold!

Nah, here's the position with black to play.

Black to play

Answer tomorrow with more Morphy tactics!