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Puzzles

 

There are two important things young students need to do when they are learning to play chess:

  1. SOLVE PUZZLES
  2. PLAY GAMES

 

Why solving puzzles?

You would laugh if someone suggested that one can learn to play ball games (baseball, soccer, basketball etc) just sitting and listening to a coach about the technique how to hit the ball and how to run. There is no way to get better in ball games besides actually hitting the ball, doing drills, workouts, and running. 

If your students do not solve (enough) puzzles in the class it means they do not do workouts – important element of any improvement.  Solving puzzles is a workout in chess (workout of brains), students who ignore puzzles missing a huge resource for improvement.  Nothing can replace puzzles.

 

Besides workout for the brain, puzzles do many other great things for students:

  1. Provide students with many patterns, that are important during the game for position evaluation. Players use pattern to navigate during the game. Paterns are some sort of map of dangers and attacks. Without patterns students cannot be effective and will miss opportunities and attacks.
  2. Calculation practice: it helps to see what happens in a move, two moves or more. Players need to be able to see the future position without moving pieces and it only comes with practice.
  3. Develops memory of important positions. That is why I recommend to solve the same book two or three times.

 

There are many different types of puzzles in available chess books and it is important to solve right puzzles. Not all puzzles will help. The puzzles we have developed in “After-school Chess” are aimed at young students, these puzzles are selected for kids’ improvement.  We are working with children for over 10 years and know exactly what puzzles students need to improve results at the tuornaments.

 

These workbooks I developed when I started teaching chess to my son six years ago. I could not find anything in stores so I had to do something by myself.

My son grew as a hyperactive boy. He liked to run and play all ball games. He never liked to spend more than a second on a thinking task, and teachers advised me to go to a doctor about his poor attention.

 

He was 4.5 years old when I taught him chess moves. He learned all moves and rules in two months using my workbooks that I developed for him. It  was good enough to start winning games in tournaments. After six months he was able to score at least 3 points in K-3 section in each tournament, even paying against older students as a five-years-old.  He improved in chess very fast and by the first grade became the top player in K-3 grade. Rarely I managed to convince him to listen to my instructions for a few minutes.

 

My son was, I believe, the only kid in the state to be a top player in the first grade, still being a K-grader.  He is also the only 2nd grader who won tournament of Champions in 2005. All other winners so far were students in 3rd grade. He won State Championship in 4th grade as a second grader, helping his team to get third place overall in 4-6 grade. He came second in the US Nationals, in grades K-3 in spring 2005, but then he told me he doesn’t want to play chess anymore because it was too slow for him.

He achieved these results only because he was doing lots of puzzles and played lots of games. He never knew many openings and did not managed to learn strategy because he could not concentrate well.  I did not mind him quitting chess, the benefits he got from solving puzzles now helping him to excel in math.

 

This is another thing how chess can help lots of other boys who are, by normal defenition, might be diagnosed with the attention deficit.