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

Does anyone here have their child in a competitive chess club? DD has JUST learned chess in the past two months (they teach it at her gifted magnet, and she plays at home)and would like to join the after-school club. This will possibly lead to her joining the school chess team, which competes regularly, travels hundreds of miles to events, and appears to be very good.

DD seems to have a bit of a talent for the game (she reports having beat kids who are really into it and have been playing for years), but she is, of course, still an amateur. How competitive/cutthroat is this world? (DD is not actually that competitive herself but can get her feelings hurt if other people are.) What kind of time commitment is it? Is she going to be the only girl, or one of very few? What is the atmosphere like? My husband and I know virtually nothing about chess or any of this.

i think it's pretty hardcore but i would say let her join the after school club and let it develop from there. i was in the school chess club but am not competitive and never went beyond that. anyway, if she likes to compete she may want to go for it. if she is delicate she may come home crying but why not let her go with the flow... if it's too much and she doesn't like it she can stop.

I do have to shell out about $200 for her to join, so there is a buy-in.

It isn't that she will cry if she loses--she's a good sport generally--but if her opponent gloated or made a big thing out of it, she might. I don't know what the culture is likely to be. She has never been in anything competitive before. We are new to the school, so I don't know anyone else with a kid on the team (I am not even totally sure about how the club vs. team thing works anyway, but my guess is that if DD can join the team, she will want to).

Chess club memberships, especially for juniors, usually cost much less than that. I would keep looking. A good online chess program
(about $30/year) is Chess Magnet School.

It's through her school as an after-school club, so very convenient. I wouldn't bother with another club (and there may not be one locally). I don't know what the charge is for, but it may pay the coaches.

DS6 is in an after school chess club that meets once a week for one hour. There is also a tournament once a year, but we have not participated in that yet. DS seems to love it, and it is very reasonable at only $25 a session (5 weeks). I had my dd7 in chess club last year but she didn't like it. I noticed there were some girls in it last year but none of them returned this year, and now there is only one girl in it this year. It does seem to be a bit male dominated.

In middle school I went to the state chess championship for my year, and did very well. As I remember, all the kids thought it was fun, and not too serious. Some of the parents thought it was a little more serious, but no one made a scene or anything. I played against a girl there, but there weren't a lot of them.

My dad bought me a chess book at around that time, but it wasn't exactly written for a middle schooler to comprehend... more like a graduate student. I never learned to properly annotate games. When I joined the chess club in high school, annotating games was a requirement. You could win a game, but have your win taken away from you if you made more than 2 mistakes with annotation. After winning a difficult game against one of the better players, my win was taken away from me due to poor annotation. I never went back after that. In fact, I have played but a few games since then.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that any talent needs to be properly supported to thrive. The fact that you're here asking questions means you probably know that though.

I don't see a big risk in joining up. If it ceases to be fun, let her stop.

Both of my kids (DS8 and DD10) play in chess club ($55 for 15 weeks) and they really like it. They also take weekly lessons, and play tournaments occasionally. Their club uses the "win with grace, lose with dignity" principle so there is no gloating tolerated. I think if she is interested, there is no harm in giving it a try.

I just joined the group today, so apologies if I am responding too late, but this is a topic I know well.

Chess is a game that can be enjoyed at all levels. The important thing is to find a set of tournaments where your child is competitive, which means she is neither losing all the time, nor winning all the time.

One thing to note is that the required level of commitment increases significantly if your child starts becoming competitive at the state or national level. Someone who just wants to play for fun will do fine with instruction from the local chess club.

However, if your child really likes the game and wants to win the state championship in a seriously competitive state, that requires private coaching and being willing to commit a couple of days a month to attending all day tournaments.

Competing at the national level gets very serious (~15 hours per week of study, plus tournaments almost every weekend, and purchases of many chess books). Don't push this onto an unwilling child. On the other hand, if your child loves chess as much as mine does, then you actually need to make time to prioritize activities other than chess. I pull him away to go out and play basketball.

This thread has been helpful to me. DD really enjoyed chess, until she didn't. I think her first tournament was too competitive for her. There is a chess club at her new school which sounds appropriate, but she hasn't tried it. Since I don't really play chess, I'm of no help for her. Are there online games she could play? What would you suggest to help a child get more confident?

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.

Another great way to practice chess skills is a puzzle called Mentagy, it was created by a chess instructor: Mentagy

"A Mind-Expanding Strategy Puzzle

This puzzle was created with the idea of helping my chess students, whose ages range from 6 to 15, understand certain concepts about choosing a chess move. When solving this puzzle you frequently encounter situations where you have several choices. In chess we refer to these choices as Candidate Moves. The term Candidate Move was popularized by the Russian author Alexander Kotov in his book: Think Like a Grandmaster. The methods used for determining the right choice in this puzzle are similar to the methods used for determining the best candidate move in a chess position"

DD likes Chess Titans, but has not yet won against Level 1. She often puts the computer in check but has not successfuly checkmated. I wonder if anyone could suggest a book aimed at true beginners (well, she knows how the pieces move, obviously, but you know--a book with simple strategies, exercises, etc).

You might want to take a look at Murray Chandler's books on Amazon. He has three books for kids, starting with "Chess for Children", and then moving up to "Chess Tactics for Kids", and then "How to beat your dad at chess". All three are highly rated, and the reviews should help you figure out which one is best for your DD.

My son really enjoyed "How to beat your dad at chess" when he read it a couple of years ago. And it was about that time that he really did start beating me.

The most selective colleges (Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford, Princeton) all have far more valedictorians applying than they could possibly accept, so what makes some candidates, including those that are not valedictorians, get selected?

My nephew at Yale (not niece as I said earlier) thinks they look for "pointy people" as opposed to well-rounded people. They look for applicants that absolutely excel at what they do, whether it is academic research (my nephew's strength), sports, national math/science contests, musical instruments, drama, community service, or yes, even chess (his roommate was ranked 2nd nationally).

Thanks for the book recs! Just nobody read them to my 3yo, okay? It already takes me waaaaay too long to beat him. (Yes, I do sometimes let him win, too.)