Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Chess club/chess team

Windows Vista (and Windows 7?) comes with a program Chess Titans that plays on levels from 1 to 10. Even a novice should be able to win against level 1 sometimes. ChessMaster software also has many playing levels.

A chess player needs to master certain skills, such as being able to mate with king and rook vs. king. She should solve lots of checkmates and other puzzles, from a book such as "Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations and Games" by Laszlo Polgar and Bruce Pandolfini.

In addition to Bostonian's comments above about solving mates, there are a number of things that an absolute novice should learn first. Examples include:

1. Establishing control of the center
2. The importance of castling
3. At least one opening

Every chess club will probably teach these concepts early as well. If not, you might be able to find a good book on this from Amazon (sorry, I don't have any specific book recommendations at this level).

GNU Chess is open source and good enough that a serious adult player I know speaks highly of it (on the hardest setting - DS8 plays it on the easiest setting and occasionally beats it to his great delight). He likes the books by Murray Chandler; had Chess for Children very early and now reads How to beat your dad at chess (although what a terrible title; DS beat his dad long before he beat his mum ;-) fairly often. The next one is Chess Tactics for Kids, which we don't have yet, but which looks as though it might be good for someone a bit more serious than DS is yes, covering the kind of thing mithawk's talking about.

Hi! My dd9 just joined the chess club. It was $15 for 6 weeks..She loves the club and the game, but doesn't love that she is the ONLY girl out of 11 kids. Sad really. The girls took drama or knitting...she lost both of her first 2 games...but her second week, she won one game.

I said after the fist week.."Those kids are pretty smart huh?" (The kids are 4th - 8th graders...she's in 4th). She said, "Well, I don't know if they are smart, just that they have a better chess stratagt..." lol...So, she wants to win and losing has only made her better...and I think she is expected to lose cause she's a girl...so she thinks it's okay to lose...and if she wins...well, that's just great...nice, and low stress.

She doesn't really play at home, so it's nice for her to get a chance to do something hard at school.

To update on DD, she did join the club and seems to be enjoying it. She has been asking to join the team, but I want to put that off for at least a year to see if she really continues to be interested. I doubt she has the level of talent or stamina required to seriously compete, but she might enjoy some small regional competitions. I don't know if I have that option, though--it may be that if she joins the teams it all gets serious fast.

Meanwhile, DS, who is 3, is getting awfully damn good at the game for a 3yo--watch out, world. We think of him as a bit less "showy" than DD, generally, but not in this arena. If he continues at this rate he will certainly be quite good at the game (for a kid) by the time he hits K.

Ultramarina,

How old is your DD, and how much interest does she have in the game? The reason I ask is that I think the best time to start competitive play is around 7-9 years old. Many children try the game when older but quickly lose interest because they lose to other kids who might not have that much innate talent, but have enough experience to beat even promising novice players.

DD's school starts chess in K, as a subject. Chess is very competitive in NYC with bragging on who coaches who etc. Not something I was ever into so I don't expect DD to be, though she seems to like it more than I ever did.

But kids are highly competitive by 2nd grade here. And even minor teams travel all over the country to compete.

My son did a week-long summer chess camp when he was 7. It was fun but very intense and we didn't do it again.
Anyway, I thought it would be fun to try a chess tournament- my son was very excited. We drove 2 hours to the San Francisco Bay area for this free chess tournament. He lost 3 and drew one game, but his games took a long time. He really held up well. We later learned that basically all of the 100 or so kids at the tournament were in a daily chess academy in San Francisco.
I realized that there was the whole, crazy world of competitive children's chess! Most of the kids were Chinese or Indian. After each match, either their parents or their chess coaches were screaming at the kids in Hindi, Chinese, whatever!! It was really horrible.
I felt like telling them that it was unlikely that their child would get to Harvard on a chess scholarship!!

The yelling in San Francisco is a bit surprising given that California is not very competitive in chess on a per-capita basis. I have been to chess nationals a couple of times and never witnessed any yelling.

Your Harvard comment is correct only in the sense that Harvard provides financial aid primarily on need. However, I live in the Boston area and know many Harvard and MIT grads that say one of reasons that they were accepted was due to their strength in chess. My niece's roommate in Yale said the same thing.

Really?? Accepted BECAUSE of strength in chess, or because of skills they gained from chess? I have never heard of chess figuring in college acceptance, though I suppose I have lots ot learn about that.

Anyway, to answer, DD is 7 and in 2nd grade. As for her level of interest--it is pretty high, but she still plays pretty impulsively (normal for her age, of course). Her complaint about the club is that the time is all spent on games and not on strategy. I have nothing whatsoever to teach her there, so some good resources would be helpful.