Whoops, there goes the Queen :(

When you teach primary school kids chess, you realise that there are successes in a chess game other than checkmate. I'm convinced that most under 10's get more of a buzz from capturing a queen, or promoting a pawn, than they do from checkmate. Partly, I guess, this is because the queen has a large material value and, as Madonna said, we're living in the material world. Also, capturing the queen is an obvious coup, when for some of these kids, checkmate is not obvious, even when they have played it. In fact, checkmate can sometimes be an anti-climax as it can sometimes take a while to sink in that they actually have delivered checkmate!

Anyway, it always keeps kids entertained when you ask them questions about trapping queens. Here's the few I showed today.

 Black here played the unfortunate 1..Nc7?? White won himself a queen with 2.Na4 Qa5+ 3.Bd2

 Again a blunder from black. I asked my kids how black should get out of check. Of course, they all saw that they had to move their king and the king could take the knight right in front of it for free! But 1..Kxe6 costs black a queen after either 2.Nb6+, or even better 2.Nf6+.

And finally a classic. This is Fischer-Reshevsky USA ch 1958. Reshevsky had just blundered, dropping his knight back to e8 when he should have exchanged the Na5 for white's light squared bishop on b3 Perhaps the experienced Reshevsky wasn't taking his young opponent totally seriously, as he allowed the spectacular 1.Bxf7+!! and every line sees the black queen in trouble:

1..Kh8 2.Ne6! winning the queen
1..Rxf7 2.Ne6! winning the queen
1..Kxf7 (played by Reshevsky) 2.Ne6! wins the queen as 2..Kxe6 3.Qd5+ leads to mate 3..Kf5 4.g4! Kxg4 5.Rg1+ Kh4 6.Qe4+ Kh3 7.Qg2+ Kh4 8.Qg4# Reshevsky played 2..dxe6, lost his queen and later the game. How good was Fischer?! He was only 15 years old when he beat USA no 1 in this game!

The moral to the story is always keep an eye out for your opponent's queen especially if it has few squares left to go to!

Time for some Classics

My lessons recently have focused on the tactical and some great attacking games. I think some of my young students are ready to take a look at some classic games. In his book "Modern Chess Preparation" Ukrainian Grandmaster and Olympiad team Captain, Vladimir Tukmakov devotes over a third of his book to looking at classic games claiming that for improving players, the "games of Capablanca are far more instructive than the extremely complex works of modern super-grandmasters". He goes on to say that strategic rules should be learned from "simple and logical examples" and that "the games of Capablanca not Alekhine, Botvinnik not Bronstein and Karpov not Kasparov" should be looked at.

So with this in mind, I am inspired to show my pupils 2 of the most famous games in history, both of them appearing in Tukmakov's book, as well as many other sources and I'll share them on this blog. In fact a little earlier this evening I looked through one of the games for the first time in a long time, and see in it one of the greatest knight outposts I can remember. Of course, this is the game Lasker-Capablanca St Petersburg 1914. I can't wait to see the kids faces when the queens are exchanged early on. Hopefully their disbelief will turn to resourcefulness when they are challenged to join Lasker in making the most of his other pieces. Another issue that is of paramount importance in this game is space which Capablanca had little of, and a permanent weakness on d6. Strategically it is a masterful game, and I hope the kids appreciate it for what it is.




To make things up to Capablanca I intend to show one of his masterful performances. I intend to show his game against Marshall where he had to defend against the Marshall Gambit. This will introduce the concepts of gambit play, attacking methods and defensive techniques, including giving back material which is something kids are always reluctant to do. I will again be interested to see the kids reactions to a game where the attacking player is the one who ends up losing.