Chapter 6 of Move Two! introduces the Giuoco Piano. Chapter 2, you will recall, taught the Giuoco Pianissimo, which has led over the years to many dull games at junior and novice level. “Old Stodge”, EM Forster called it, quite rightly. It’s dangerously easy to play the opening but hard to play the middle game because of the closed nature of the position and the lack of suitable pawn breaks. Because children have no problem learning the moves, playing like this is superficially attractive and many of them go for years without trying anything else before giving up the game out of sheer boredom. You just need to know how to play it with Black, and to recognize from a long way off the idea of pinning the knight, attacking the pinned piece and doubling the pawns in front of the king.

But children will only make real progress when they learn to calculate: and one way of learning this is by playing open positions. The open lines of the Giuoco Piano are ideally suited for this purpose. Theoretically, it’s not dangerous for Black, but at lower levels this really doesn’t matter. Children will move on to the mostly quieter, but more subtle, waters of the Ruy Lopez when they’re ready to do so.

So we start with 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 Bc5 4. c3. Important point: many novices fail to understand how the c-pawn can be used in fighting for the centre, only moving their e- and d-pawns at the start of the game. I can feel another article coming on: think of the Queen’s Gambit, the Sicilian Defence and the English Opening, not to mention the Ruy Lopez. We then travel down the main line: 4.. Nf6 5. d4. Another important point: the strength of the pawns on e4 and d4, and the concept that, if after 1. e4 your opponent plays a move that doesn’t prevent or discourage 2. d4, that’s the move that should be played.

After 5.. exd4 (we consider some of Black’s undesirable alternatives here) 6. cxd4 White has constructed the ideal centre. Black needs to challenge this so gains time by playing a check: 6.. Bb4+. Now White has a choice. 7. Bd2 is solid and, as long as Black challenges the centre with 7.. Bxd2+ 8. Nbxd2 d5, he will reach an equal position with White having an IQP (Isolated Queen’s Pawn) – another important topic for later discussion.

Instead White may prefer the gambit lines starting with 7. Nc3. This has been considered theoretically dubious for many years, but, at this level, no matter. Open positions where rapid development and precise calculation are necessary are ideal for developing tactical ability. Unless s/he knows the theory, Black is unlikely to find the correct moves. For example. after 7.. Nxe4 8. 0-0, as we’re taught to prefer bishops to knights in open positions, 8.. Nxc3 is more intuitive than 8.. Bxc3, but it’s the latter that gives Black chances of an advantage while the former favours White. Anyone playing lower level competitive chess who learns the material in this chapter will surely score well with it as very few of their opponents will know the theory.

The Activities section then presents a short selection of quick White wins in this opening. This is a feature which will eventually be expanded as the material is developed. It’s infinitely easier now than it was 20 years ago when Move Two! was written to find suitable games, and we can easily arrange for them to be playable online to assist the student.

Masters of the Universe, our exploration of the history of chess through its world champions, reaches Alexander Alekhine in Part 6. We take a brief look at his life and career and demonstrate two games, one from his teenage years, and one from towards the end of his career. The name of Alekhine’s opponent in the first game is given as Rozanov and Romanov in different sources. On writing this I just noticed something that hadn’t occurred to me before: both games conclude with 26. Qg5xg6.

Richard James

You will be relieved to hear that this week’s article will be mercifully short as I’m in the middle of a domestic crisis. My electricity has failed so at present I have minimal power and no internet access at home. It may also be a few days before I’m able to reply to any comments on here.

Anyway, we’ve now reached Chapter 5 of Move Two!, entitled Mating Combinations.

Knowing the basic checkmate patterns is vital for any aspiring chess player. Of course, you’ll only get most of these positions in your games a few times in your life, but you still need to know them. For every one occasion a position like this happens there will be several others where it happens ‘in the notes’. You put your pieces in place but your opponent sees it coming a long way off and prevents it. Beyond that, though, learning these patterns teaches the student a lot about how different pieces work together. Pattern recognition is one of the keys to chess success, and these are just some of the patterns you need to know.

This also reinforces the idea that you need to look at every check. Beginners often choose a move simply ‘because it’s check’, which is not in itself a good reason. A good reason is ‘because it’s mate’ or ‘because it leads to mate’, and this brings us back to Chapter 1 and learning how to look ahead.

Regular practice at solving both checkmate and material winning puzzles is something that all chess teachers should encourage.

Within the confines of Move Two! there’s only room for a few examples. For books which go into this topic in far more detail I’d recommend the classic The Art of the Checkmate by Renaud and Kahn, or the more recent How to Beat Your Dad at Chess by Murray Chandler (great book and great title – I wish I’d got there first – but the two have nothing to do with each other). There’s also a wide choice of books and websites for those who want to improve their checkmating, tactics and calculation skills.

There then follows a quiz with ten more examples of standard checkmate patterns for the reader to solve.

The Activities section introduces the open variation of the Giuoco Piano. Readers are invited to try this out for themselves, writing down their moves, before moving onto the next chapter (and a future article for Nigel’s blog) in which they’ll be introduced to some of the theory of the opening.

Finally, Masters of the Universe takes up the history of the world championship in 1921, where Lasker lost to the hero of this chapter, the great José Raul Capablanca. Students have a chance to play Guess the Moves with this game:

Capa, of course, was a famous prodigy, as was Sammy Reshevsky, the other star of this chapter. We look at one of his early games, played in a simul in Berlin. Sammy, needless to say, was the player giving the simul.

Richard James

Let me take you back to the year 1961, the year in which I was fortunate enough to win a free place at a leading London school. The journey required two trains: from my local station to Richmond, and then on the London Underground District Line from Richmond to Ravenscourt Park, a journey of about 12 minutes, where I’d be in the company of other boys from my school.

My father had taught me the moves the previous winter, but in those days chess was something you did at secondary school, not primary school. On my first day I brought my pocket chess set into school and another boy gave me a game. He took all my pieces and mated me with his two rooks. I soon discovered that some of the boys on the District Line also enjoyed chess, and was able to play them. Towards the end of the school year I was thrilled to win my first game on the train against a boy from the year above me.

In those days there was nothing strange about playing chess on trains or buses: it was perfectly normal, accepted behaviour in the 1960s. But when did you last see anyone playing chess on a commuter train or bus? In these days of mobile electronic devices of all sorts, there’s so much else to do.

Of course I played at school as well, at break and lunchtime. My progress was slow, but by the end of 1965 I could beat everyone else in my form, so my parents went to the library to obtain details of our local chess club (I’m still a member today) and somehow also found out about the London Junior Championships which took place (and still do) in the Christmas holidays.

What happened to the other boys on the District Line? For most of them, of course, chess was just a passing interest, but there were others who continued playing. One of the boys on the train (in fact on both my trains), a few years older than me, is still occasionally active with an ECF grade of 160.

Another of the District Line boys, a year younger than me I think, was not, as far as I remember, much of a chess player at the time, but he took up competitive chess many years later and is now one of the most active players in the country, with a current ECF grade of 153.

There was another boy on the District Line as well, but as he was younger still I didn’t take a lot of notice of him. I was to get to know him much better when he joined the my chess club. His name was, and still is, Michael Stean, and I guess most of you know what happened to him.

All in all, not a bad chess record, I think you’ll agree, for the boys on the Richmond branch of the District Line.

There’s another branch of the District Line passing through Ravenscourt Park, the Ealing branch. (There were at the time two Ealing trains to every one Richmond train, which was twice as crowded. The Richmond branch boys assumed the man who devised the timetables lived in Ealing.) There would also have been a chess player on the Ealing branch: his name was Andrew Law.

Andrew, who sadly died very recently, was an exact contemporary of mine, but fortunately for me we were never in the same form so at the time I didn’t know him well and probably never played chess against him at school. If I had done, perhaps I wouldn’t have sought stronger opposition elsewhere, in which case I wouldn’t be writing this now. Andrew, as my English readers will know, was a very strong player, achieving two IM performances and just missing his final norm. A less self-effacing person with the same talent as Andrew would have gone much further.

It may or may not also be significant that there was no real chess club at school while I was there. There was at one point a small, student-led group, but I don’t remember anything else and we never played against other schools. Michael Stean mentioned a chess club in an interview in CHESS a couple of years ago, so perhaps there was something after I left the school. I played bridge for my school, but chess for my club. If there had been a school club, I might never have joined my local club, and, again, you might not be reading this now.

Now turn the clock forward more than half a century, to the present day. I’ve written in a previous blog about the three main services a children’s chess club can offer: instruction for beginners, opportunities for casual play with low-level instruction, and more serious instruction for competitive players. We get enquiries from all three categories. The players we really want are those who, as I was, are doing well at school and want to take the game further. This is what Richmond Junior Club, as an aspiring (and former) Centre of Excellence, is all about. The only problem is that we increasingly get parents of younger children who know little about chess themselves and are deluded about how good their children really are. We also get parents who want their children to learn chess but don’t know enough to teach them. At present we’re not geared up to do this but if there’s sufficient simultaneous demand we might be able to do so in future. For those parents who just want to give their children the opportunity to play other kids, the obvious answer is to join their school club. If their school doesn’t have a club we could help them set one up.

Isn’t there another solution, though? If they enjoy playing chess why don’t they just do what I did back in 1961: bring a chess set into school and find someone to play against. Then, if they find they can beat all their friends, they’re probably good enough to join Richmond Junior Club.

What is this all about, then? Why is it that all the kids who enjoy playing chess in their primary school chess club don’t seem to play against their friends at any other time?

Why does everyone seem to think that, because there are such things as chess clubs in some primary schools, you’re not allowed to play chess any other time? It almost seems that chess has gone underground, but not this time on the District Line. Can anyone tell me why?

Richard James

Forgive me if I sometimes feel cynical about chess teaching. If I share some of my experiences with you, you might understand why.

Some years ago I was teaching two boys, aged about 8 and 5, who lived in a multi-million pound house and attended a local prep school. The older boy was not really interested and his brother was far too young. The only chess set in the house was a Simpsons set, so when I didn’t remember to bring in a set we had to play on that. I could never remember which piece Bart was supposed to be.

“Yes, I realise they’re probably too young”, their mother once said to me, “but they won’t have time when they’re older”.

Within this area, parents very much see chess as something you do when you’re very young, but give up at 8 or 9 because you have too much schoolwork. Our chess clubs have lots of children in Years 3 and 4 (age 7 to 9) but then they all stop. Previous posts here have suggested several reasons for this: lack of progress as well as lack of time. We need to get across a different message – that if you like the game you must find time to continue because you’ll develop thinking skills which will help you academically.

Then there was the girl from a local prep school who was a complete beginner, but whose parents insisted that she should learn. Every week I asked her mother to ensure that her parents played against her during the week so that she’d be able to put into practice what I’d taught her, and every week they promised to do so. The following week, inevitably, her mother would apologise profusely that they’d been too busy to practise the previous week, but promised me faithfully that they’d do so in future. Needless to say, the girl made little progress.

There was also the boy who was being home-schooled in order to pass a scholarship to one of the leading prep schools in London. He was often tired from a 3-hour French or Maths lesson before his chess lesson, I was teaching him sitting next to him (inappropriate for more than one reason) in a small study and the lessons were interrupted by his two out-of-control younger brothers, one of whom kept on trying to eat the pieces. He didn’t seem very interested in chess and his parents seemed unable to give him much support.

It’s because of experiences like this that I no longer offer private tuition for young beginners. I don’t want to waste my time or the parents’ money. Instead I email them a copy of Journey Through Chess, encourage them to buy a copy of The Right Way to Teach Chess to Kids when it comes out, tell them that the younger children start the more help they’ll need at home, and add that if their children are really passionate about wanting to play chess every day then I might consider private tuition.

For the vast majority of children, private tuition is not the best way for young beginners to learn chess, anyway. If the parents are themselves enthusiastic about chess then learning at home is great. Otherwise, the best option is to learn with a group of friends, either at school or in a junior chess club.

If you’ve read some of my earlier articles you’ll know that I’m pretty cynical about after-school chess clubs as well. Although children are enthusiastic about chess in the short term, the standards are low, they make little progress and soon drop out. Many of these children would have been taught the moves in half an hour by parents with little knowledge of the game and consequently join their school club before they have any real comprehension of its underlying logic.

I believe there is an answer, though. You run a national chess curriculum for primary school age children. At each level you receive a badge or certificate or whatever. Passing each level would be based partly on a written test and partly on an assessment. Children are used to this idea: many children do Martial Arts where there are regular assessment days after which successful candidates receive a different coloured belt. You run beginners’ groups: on the school curriculum, as after-school clubs or in community chess clubs. If you want to join your school chess club or a junior chess club you have to pass an assessment. You’d then move on up into higher groups as your chess expertise increases. Schools, by and large, would only run lower level clubs, and could decide whether they just wanted chess to be a fun activity or provide tuition to take children up to the next level. Very ambitious schools might want to run higher level groups as well, possibly opening them up to children from other schools in the area. Junior chess clubs would run groups at higher levels, feeding children who want to make further progress through from local primary schools.

I’ll expand on what the curriculum might include in a later post if there’s interest. But what do you think? Is it workable? Would something of this nature make me less cynical about chess teaching?

Richard James

I sometimes ask my pupils to guess what my three favourite things in the world are. One, I tell them, is chocolate, one is ice cream, and the third is – pawn endings. (I suppose some of you might have a fourth as well!)

There are several reasons why I do a lot of work on pawn endings with my pupils. One is that they involve pure calculation, and thus are excellent for developing that skill. Another is that many games, not just at junior level, involve a decision as to whether or not to trade off the last remaining big guys into a pawn ending. You can’t make this decision with any degree of accuracy or confidence until you’re really good at pawn endings. Finally, as you’ll know if you’ve read my earlier posts here, there are lots of kids who think material doesn’t matter and deliberately give away pieces, and many other kids who are so obsessed with not wanting to lose pieces that they refuse to make equal trades, or even to trade weaker pieces for stronger pieces. Understanding pawn endings, and understanding that an advantage of just one pawn will often win, will help them understand the importance of having a material advantage.

This, I tell my pupils, is the most important position in chess. You can’t understand openings until you understand middle games, and you can’t understand middle games until you understand endings. You can’t understand other endings until you understand pawn endings, because you won’t know whether or not you’re trying to trade off. You can’t understand pawn endings until you understand this critical position.

When I ask children to give a reason for their choice of move with Black here, if they don’t know the position already they’ll nearly always say the same thing. They’ll select a random move and tell me they chose it because they’ll be able to capture the white pawn if it advances. This is a typical differentiation error. Children will typically select one criterion, in this case stopping the pawn from advancing, and then choose the first move they find that meets that criterion. The idea of comparing moves and considering what their opponent’s best response might be is very difficult for concrete operational learners.

So, in Chapter 4 of Move Two! we look at this and other fundamental King and Pawn vs King positions. Without a higher level understanding, constant repetition will be necessary for the student to master these.

In the Quiz section children have to master two positions.

They have to win this position with White to play.

And they have to draw this position with Black (White will play Ke2 as his first move).

A mini-quiz of five questions follows to check understanding of King and Pawn against King.

My view is that students should start by learning the openings starting with 1. e4 e5. I’ll write more about this when we reach the later chapters on openings. It pains me to see children in lower levels of the Richmond Rapidplays who all seem to play the Colle or London Systems with White and the Caro-Kann or Scandinavian with Black. But if you’re playing in tournaments, espcially adult tournaments, you’re going to need to know a little bit about other openings. The Activities section of Chapter 4, then, provides a quick list of other first moves you might encounter when playing 1. e4.

Masters of the Universe features one of my personal chess heroes, Emanuel Lasker, a man with what British politician Denis Healey once described as ‘hinterland’. We look at his famous double bishop sacrifice game, and learn some important attacking techniques. We also meet, very briefly, some of his great contemporaries and rivals: Pillsbury, Tarrasch, Schlechter and Rubinstein, and analyse the famous game between Rotlewi and Rubinstein, another game that teaches attacking techniques while requiring calculation skills along with imagination.

Richard James

In the week before the Easter holidays I decided to ask my pupils some very simple questions. I presented them with six positions, five after Black’s 2nd move and one after Black’s 3rd move, and invited them to find the best move for White, giving their reasons. What was interesting was that none of the children in Years 3 and 4 (aged 7 to 9) at the private school where I recently started teaching managed to get every question right, whereas in the state school a mile away where I’ve been teaching for some time many of the children scored 100%.

The first question came from a Facebook discussion with Paul Swaney, an award winning chess teacher from Arlington, Virginia. He had given this position to his pupils, most of whom selected f3 as their answer, refusing to capture the bishop because they didn’t want to bring their queen out too soon. I guess he’d probably advised them not to bring their queen out too soon the previous week. Most of my students solved this correctly. I did get a few f3s from the Year 3s who hadn’t realised they could capture the queen.

By and large, children were much more confident about winning material than getting checkmate, possibly because I’d been repeating over the last few weeks the idea that they should take a piece for free or capture a higher value piece with a lower value piece. Most of them had seen Scholar’s Mate before but would they recognise it? Some did, some didn’t. Several children saw the attack on their queen and moved it to a safe square. Others played Bxf7+ “because it’s checkmate”, “because it’s check” or “because it captures a pawn and is safe”. Some also played Qxe5+ “because it’s safe” or “because it’s checkmate”.

This was one of the other starting points of this exercise. I wrote a few weeks ago about watching a game in which a boy failed to capture the rook here so I’ve been drilling this position into all my pupils since then. Gratifyingly, most of them did indeed capture the rook in this position, telling me that they’d win 5 points and lose 3 points. I suspect, though, that if I’d given them this question a month or so earlier many of them would have failed.

Most students solved this correctly, telling me that they’d win their opponent’s strongest piece, or that they’d win 9 points. Several chose to capture the pawn on e5 rather than the queen, telling me that it was safe or would win one point. Typically, children will go for the first move they see that looks good rather than considering or comparing alternatives.

Most children had seen Fool’s Mate before but many were unable to recognise it here. One of two of those who selected Qh5 did so “because it’s check”, not realising that it was mate. Instead, Bxg5 was a disturbingly popular move, as was e5. I guess I need to give my pupils more practice at solving checkmate puzzles.

Another exercise in winning points. Many of the students correctly captured the knight but some chose exd6 instead, making the first capture they saw rather than looking for the best capture. A popular answer was Bb5+ which several thought was mate, forgetting that you can block a check from a bishop, while others played it just “because it’s check”. I guess I also need to remind them that “because it’s check” is not always a good reason for playing a move.

I have another simple question for you. There are three ways I could approach after-school chess clubs of this nature. I could just let them play, while providing individual advice, keeping track of the results and perhaps running league tables with promotion and relegation. I could spend 15 minutes of each lesson standing in front of a demo board or smartboard giving a lesson – which is what I suspect most teachers do. Or I could spend 15 minutes of each lesson getting children to solve simple worksheets. Which do you prefer, and why? In the past I used to choose one of the first two options, depending on the wishes of the school. My experience was that the standard of play tended to be higher at the schools where I just let them play. Perhaps this was partly because I’m not very good at standing in front of a class talking, but perhaps it’s also because, although children might enjoy the lessons, they’ll just be confused because they haven’t mastered the basics. After all, if you’re teaching maths, when you introduce a new concept you’re going to repeat it, reinforce it, test your students to make sure they all understand it, before moving onto the next topic. If you give them a lesson on multiplication one lesson and on division the next lesson I suspect it’s not really going to work. So now I’m giving children worksheets to find out whether or not they really understand the basics of chess: winning material and getting checkmate. Once they all understand this we can move on. The problem is, though, that while some children enjoy doing worksheets, others do not. At my new school, where the children were used to listening to lessons from their previous teacher, some of them have stopped coming, perhaps because they don’t like being expected to work.

So what I need to do is ask the school another simple question: do you want me to run a fun after-school activity where the children will make little progress or do you want me to run a chess class which will perhaps have less appeal but provide more benefits?

Richard James

Returning to Move Two!, Chapter 3 is the first of a series concerning Tactics in the Openings.

Games are often decided by tactics at the start of the game. The same tactical motifs happen over and over again, not just in games played at junior level. Pattern recognition is vital: serious competitive players need to be very familiar with all these ideas. I don’t recall seeing any other books for players of this level which look at tactical ideas in this way. One of the major points of Move Two! is that it’s very much based on what actually happens in games played at this level, not at what happens in master games.

This chapter starts off with The Fatal Diagonal – the e1-h4 diagonal for White and the e8-h5 diagonal for Black. All children like to see Fool’s Mate and we present other examples of players who learn the hard way about the dangers of moving your f-, g- and h-pawns injudiciously in the opening. In recent years I’ve won more than one game against children of secondary school age who played for several years at primary school with 1. f4 e5 2. g3 exf4 3. gxf4 Qh4#.

Almost every week, if, as I do, you look at the quick wins on TWIC, you’ll find games decided by queen forks in the opening. Very often this will be Qa4/5+, forking a loose minor piece. It’s very easy to fall for this even if you’re familiar with the idea. We also look at the similar idea of Qh5/4+, again to fork a loose minor piece, and the very important idea of Qd5/4, for instance if White takes on e5 before castling in many Ruy Lopez positions. One correction in this section: in the Marshall-Chigorin game Black played on rather than resigning. I give the complete game below.

Many of us tend to think about development in the opening and only switch on our tactics brain in the middle game. Even the best are not always immune from this, as you’ll see from these games where two of the all-time greats, both renowned for being almost unbeatable at their best, fall for queen forks in the opening.


There then follows a quiz based partly on the Giuoco Pianissimo from the previous chapter and partly on the opening tactics from this chapter. The Activities section then invites the student to consider some positions with king and pawn against king which will be analysed in Chapter 4.

Masters of the Universe introduces the first official world champion, Wilhelm Steinitz and demonstrates two of his games. The first is a fun game to play through but I need to try to check the provenance at some point. My source gives it as played at rook odds while ChessBase gives it as played without odds. I’ve also seen it attributed to Morphy. (You’ll no doubt spot the notation error which will be corrected in future editions.) The second, the famous Hastings 1895 game against von Bardeleben, features an opening which will be studied in a later chapter.

Finally, please note that the individual chapters are html pages, not pdf format (as advertised on the website assuming I haven’t got round to correcting it before this is published) so you’ll need the ChessBase fonts in order to view the diagrams.

Richard James

I’ll return to Move Two! shortly. But first, something else.

Readers of my articles will probably be aware that I stopped most of my chess teaching several years ago because of my frustrations with the whole concept of after-school chess clubs in primary schools.

With a successful book for children published and a new book for parents about to appear, I thought I ought to return, and have just started teaching at an after-school chess club at a local prep school (private school for boys aged up to 13, girls aged up to 11).  This is one of the leading schools in the area, whose pupils regularly win scholarships to top secondary schools. The children there are polite, attentive and enthusiastic, the teachers highly skilled and devoted, the parents always fully supportive.

I had been talking to the pre-prep department (children aged up to 7) about starting a chess course for beginners based on the ‘slow’ methods I recommend, in September, and as the chess teacher at the main school had left at Christmas the pre-prep head put me in touch with them. The children were clearly very fond of my predecessor and, from talking to them, he’d taught them all the right things.

The first week I watched a game where one boy made an excellent move, playing a rook check which his opponent could only block by interposing his queen. However, instead of capturing the queen, the first player moved his rook away. I asked him why he didn’t take the queen. He replied that he didn’t want to lose his rook.

The next week I asked them how much the pieces were worth. They answered in unison that the pawn was worth 1 point, the knights and bishops 3 each, the rooks 5 and the queens 9. But when I asked them whether they’d swap their bishop for their opponent’s rook I was greeted by a sea of blank faces. When I asked why a rook was better than a bishop a girl told me it was because a rook was worth 5 points and a bishop only 3 points.

It’s possible that some of them didn’t understand the concept of swapping, but more likely, in most cases, that they had failed to make the jump in logic between assigning numbers to pieces and understanding that this indicates their relative strength, and therefore they should try to trade off their less valuable pieces for their opponent’s more valuable pieces.

This may be obvious to older learners but my impression since I started to ask children questions is that it’s not at all obvious to younger learners. Children often see things purely in their own terms so only think about the piece they’re losing, not about the piece they’re winning.

Equally, it may be obvious to us, and perhaps to older learners, that, because we want to capture undefended pieces, insuffiently defended pieces or stronger piece in exchange for weaker pieces, that we need to look for captures before deciding on our move. Likewise, we also need to look at our opponent’s possible captures. But when I suggest to children who have been playing for several years that they should look for captures, they look at me in amazement.

I also asked them the best way of starting the game. They all told me their previous teacher had advised them to move their e-pawn, develop their knights and bishops quickly and castle to make their king safe. But were they doing this? I watched one game which started 1. e4 e5 2. Qe2 Qg5 3. Qe3 Bb4 4. Qxg5, at which point Black claimed, incorrectly, as he hadn’t been watching the board, that the white queen was actually on f3. Another game saw White developing well: 1. e4 a5 2. Nf3 Ra6 3. Nc3. Here, I asked him why he didn’t play Bxa6. “I thought I’d leave it till next move” was the reply. Another boy moved all his pawns at the start of the game. Don't forget that these are intelligent, in some cases highly intelligent 7-9 year olds.

I asked them how many of them played at home against their parents. All the hands went up. I then asked how many could beat their parents. Only one hand was lowered. You can see what’s happening – and this matches my observation of parents playing games against their children elsewhere. Parents who know little about chess beyond how the pieces move are trying to support their children by teaching them the moves and playing games against them. The children play the way their parents play rather than the way their teacher tells them to play. I would guess that, in some cases, Dad plays chess but doesn’t get home from work before bedtime, leaving Mum, who doesn’t really play at all, to give the children a game.

There is, it seems to me, little point in teachers standing in front of the class giving young children abstract information which they are unable to put into practice. Nor is there a lot of point in showing children who don’t understand the basic concepts of the game how Morphy defeated the Aristocratic Allies, or indeed any very much else at all. These basic concepts need to be repeated and reinforced over and over again, at home by parents as well as at school by chess teachers. At present it just doesn’t work because not enough parents understand the basic concepts themselves.

This is why the after-school/lunchtime chess club system is not, in my opinion, a good model. Teaching the basics on the curriculum, as CSC are doing in Newham and elsewhere, is great, but in an affluent area like Richmond, schools just won’t buy it. What I’m planning in this school is to run a beginners’ group in the pre-prep teaching the basics (the Head Teacher fully understands where I’m coming from and is totally supportive) and perhaps eventually introducing a test for membership of the main school club. I’d be very interested to hear from any other teachers or schools interested in promoting and developing this method.