One of the ideas of Move Two! and, more generally, of much of what I write, is that it’s based on what happens in children’s games, not what happens in grandmaster games. I currently have a database of 16488 games played at Richmond Junior Club between 1977 and 2006, with some more still to enter which will take the number up to about 17000. In particular, the openings I teach at this level are based on repeated patterns and ideas seen in games played by young players.

I recommend that young players should start by learning the openings starting 1. e4 e5, because these rely more on a combination of memory and calculation and less on positional judgement than other openings. As I’ve explained elsewhere, many children under the age of 12 will find it hard to understand chess at a higher level, but will learn through memory and mimicry.

Our first openings chapter features the Giuoco Pianissimo. If you teach your children the basic opening principles and let them get on with it you’ll end up with large numbers of Giuoco Pianissimos and Spanish Four Knights. Safe and solid, but rather boring, you might think. But there’s one vital plan you need to know: you’ll find very little if anything about this in most openings books but it happens over and over again in junior chess. I win games against children in this way (OK, I may turn the board round and let them finish me off) on a regular basis.

We teach our pupils, quite correctly, to bring their minor pieces out quickly, place their knights in the centre and castle as soon as they can to make their king safe. But anyone who does this against me, especially with White, will probably lose very quickly, something like this.

It’s very simple: once they castle you play Bg4, Nd4 (they often play Nxd4, losing their queen), then either Nxf3, and after gxf3, Bh3 and get the queen onto the g-file as in the game above, or, depending on White’s moves, Bxf3, and after gxf3, Qd7, Qh3. By learning these simple plans you can win game after game, especially with Black. It often works against the Ruy Lopez as well, and can also occur in some Sicilian positions.

You can also try it with White by playing the Canal Variation (named after the Peruvian grandmaster Esteban Canal, who appropriately enough, lived much of his life in Venice). I teach my pupils to remember the move order: Pawn, Knight, Bishop (on the king-side), Pawn, Knight, Bishop (on the queen-side). If Black castles you’re in business but instead 6…h6 or 6…Na5 are fine. If your opponents avoid the tactics you just get a rather dull position: in which case it’s time to learn something more interesting and exciting to do with the white pieces.

There’s more you need to know as well. Many young players are tempted to move their knight to g5 to threaten a fork on f7. This is fine in the Two Knights’ Defence as long as you know what you’re doing, but not if your opponent can castle. You need to recognize this attack and remember to castle if you can (many players fail to find this defence at primary school level), and if they then play Bxf7+ you take back, and with bishop and knight against rook and pawn along with a big lead in development you stand better. (Many players meet Bxf7+ with Kh8 or Nxf7 with a queen move because they don’t want to lose a rook.)

The Activities section of Chapter 2 features some more games with this opening for students to play through with their teacher (possibly as Guess the Move exercises). Putting up online databases relevant to each chapter is a possible further project related to Move Two!.

Masters of the Universe introduces the reader to Paul Morphy, demonstrating a game he played at the age of 12 (the first of a number of games played by future champions in their youth to be featured in the book) along with THE famous Opera House game, which Hugh Patterson discussed in a recent Chess Improver article.

Richard James

In this and subsequent posts I intend to look more closely at my book Move Two! and explain more about what was in my mind when I wrote it.

It was originally written in 1992 as a follow-up to Move One! which Faber & Faber had published in 1990 and was originally intended to be the second part of a three-volume course. A revised and corrected edition was produced in 1997. The book comprises 16 chapters, one for every piece in your army.

I had identified three stages in children’s chess development: Vision, Calculation and Judgement. Move One! concentrated on developing chessboard vision: the ability to see at a glance where every piece was and what every piece could do. The Move One! syllabus also included basic checkmates, basic tactical motifs and basic opening knowledge. (My current basic syllabus, as found in Chess for Kids and the elementary lessons on chessKIDS academy, doesn’t go as far as this.) Move Two!, therefore, focussed on Calculation, as well as providing the basic opening knowledge and endgame skills required for success in junior tournaments. In addition, the course provided an introduction to chess culture through the history of the World Championship.

The first chapter, entitled Winning Moves, therefore, is a basic introduction to the concept of calculation, taught through some simple combinations, along with some advice on how to look ahead and a 10 question quiz (answers at the back of the book). Andrew Soltis once wrote that chess isn’t 99% tactics, it’s 99% calculation. You have to calculate everything that moves, not just what we think of as tactics: sacrifices and mates. I teach my pupils that when they’re playing chess, their name isn’t Nigel Davies (or whatever it happens to be) but Tactics Tactics Tactics. Perhaps I should say Calculation Calculation Calculation instead, but everyone enjoys playing sacrifices and finding checkmates, so practising tactics is a good way of developing your calculation skills.

My experience when using Move Two! in the past was that children found the tactics chapters difficult compared to the rest of the book. But looking at, for example, the Steps Method, convinced me that children who want to do well at chess should be spending time solving tactical puzzles on a regular basis. Children who have spent time on one-move puzzles will have developed 20-20 chessboard vision, and, once they’re onto Move Two! they should be tackling two-move puzzles and beyond. If the basic skills are in place and reinforced regularly they shouldn’t find the tactical material in the book beyond them. These days there are a number of websites where you can practise this skill online for free. I recommend www.ideachess.com as the best site for beginners as it contains a lot of very simple one-move puzzles, while the site I use myself is Chess Tactics Server (http://chess.emrald.net/). Nigel has also mentioned several software products which he uses for this purpose. Books such as Move Two!, by their nature, cannot contain enough material for students to get sufficient practice at this vital skill.

In each chapter there is a short Activities section after the main lesson. In chapters preceding lessons on openings children are shown the moves and asked to practise them for themselves to see what happens in their games before finding out the theory. In this case we’re looking at a very popular opening in Primary School chess, the Giuoco Pianissimo (of which there were a few examples in Move One!). I’ll write a lot more about this in my next article.

The second main part of each chapter is headed Masters of the Universe, and is a history of world championship chess. I consider it very important that children should be encouraged to take an interest in chess culture: that they should not play their games in a vacuum but be aware of where they themselves and their games fit into the whole wide world of chess. Sadly, though, many of my pupils don’t take very much of an interest and their parents don’t do a lot to encourage them by helping them keep up to date with chess news, perhaps because they themselves don’t understand why it’s important.

Each chapter includes two games, usually short games with a tactical point. I encourage teachers to use these as “Guess the Move” exercises, with the student taking the winning side and trying to predict the next move. Teachers could award a point for each move guessed correctly, or, using Ray Cannon’s Choices method, get their pupils to write down three guesses, awarding 3 points if the first move was chosen, 2 points if the second move was chosen and 1 point if the third move was chosen. The idea of this exercise is to develop breadth as well as depth of thinking: to consider several alternatives (candidate moves) rather than just playing the first move that comes to mind.

We start off at the dawn of international chess, with the series of matches played in 1834 between McDonnell and Bourdonnais. Although the Frenchman won most games, it was McDonnell who played the most brilliant combinations so we look at one of his games. After learning about Staunton and Saint Amant’s 1843 match we move onto the first international chess tournament, London 1851, and look at a game played (not in the tournament) by Adolf Anderssen.

Finally, at the end of each chapter, we have a few bullet points as reminders of the main lessons which should have been learnt.

The story of how I became a chess author goes like this.

In 1975 my late friend and colleague Mike Fox and I started Richmond Junior Chess Club. Mike worked in advertising: a few years later his job took him to Birmingham, and we kept in touch only sporadically. One of his clients was Rolls Royce: he devised a series of adverts for them based on unlikely facts about their cars. The campaign was highly successful: RR suggested that they could turn the adverts into a book and put them in touch with Faber & Faber. As a result of this, Rolls Royce: The Complete Works by Mike Fox and Steve Smith was born. The book became a best-seller, and the publishers asked Mike for another book, on whatever subject he chose. He decided that chess would be a suitable topic for a similar book and Faber & Faber, who had several chess books on their list, including Fischer’s My 60 Memorable Games, agreed. One day in February 1986, while I was sitting in my London office wondering how to get out of a dead-end job, the phone rang. “Hello Richard, it’s Mike. This phone call could change your life.” And it did.

So The Complete Chess Addict was born: perhaps I’ll write more about this when I can’t think of anything else to write about children’s chess, but not now. Again, the book was successful, so I suggested to Faber & Faber that perhaps I could write a chess book for children. I envisaged three volumes covering what I considered to be the three stages of children’s chess development: Vision, Calculation, Judgement, and the first volume, Move One!, was published in 1990. I wrote Move Two! and Faber & Faber, after some thought, decided they wanted to publish it. I think The Even More Complete Chess Addict (1993), a new edition published to coincide with the Kasparov-Short match, was, apart from some problem books by Sir Jeremy Morse (which I presume he funded himself) their last chess book. But before things progressed any further they decided to pull out of publishing chess books and sold the rights of their chess titles to a Bridge publishing company, who in turn sold them to Batsford. For this reason Move Two! was never published, even though I think it’s the best, or at least the most useful book I’ve written.

There are many books for beginners which introduce young children to the game. There are many more books for adults of club standard and above. But there’s very little for adult social players who would like to improve to reach club level, although Dan Heisman is now writing very successfully for this market. And there’s also very little for children who know the basics but want to take the game further. Move Two! was written for this market, and I still use it today for private pupils at this level. After a few years I decided that the tactical material was too hard for children who, if they were playing in tournaments, needed to read the opening and ending sections, but now I’ve changed my mind and think the book stands up well. If children are spending time solving tactical puzzles on a regular basis, as I recommend elsewhere, they will be able to cope with the tactics chapters without too much trouble.

The book comprises 16 chapters, alternating opening, middle game and ending, along with quizzes, other activities, and, uniquely, at the end of each chapter, Masters of the Universe, a history of world championship chess up to that point, with, in each section, two games, often played by future world champions in their youth. I’m very much in favour of teaching chess culture and history.

The book is currently available for free download at chessKIDS academy (http://www.chesskids.com/grownups/move2.pdf): there are some typos (you don’t need to tell me: I know where they are) and it needs updating to take the last 20 years of chess history into account. Perhaps one day I’ll do this and publish it as an e-book if I can’t find a publisher. I really ought to think about Move Three! as well, although it probably needs a stronger player than me as co-author.

Future articles will consider Move Two! in more detail and look at the thinking behind its contents.

I’m not, and never have been, a parent myself, but over the years I’ve read quite a few parenting books. It’s useful, I think, for those of us who teach chess to understand different parenting styles so that we can understand where parents are coming from. We must also try not to be judgemental when dealing with parents, who are perhaps from another culture from ours, and whose parenting style does not match our own.

Amy Chua’s 2011 book The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother has received much publicity, and much criticism, often from those who haven’t read the book themselves. In fact the book contains a certain amount of self-deprecatory humour and the title itself is ironic. If you read the book you’ll see that Chua’s parenting methods worked well for her older daughter but not so well for her younger daughter. This perhaps typifies a parenting style in which children take part in a small number of extra-curricular activities, but are expected to be serious, committed, and to excel at what they do. The Polgars are notable and extreme example of this approach applied to chess. In one sense, these are the families we as chess teachers are looking for. We want to make our name by teaching champions and families who prefer this parenting style are where you may well find your most serious and diligent students. We need to persuade these parents that chess could be an ideal extra-curricular subject for their children to study, either as something they can excel at for its own sake or as a means of accelerating the development of adult thinking skills, and provide them with the means to do this even if the parents themselves are not chess players.

Some parents these days are taking a very different view. They believe that children are not allowed just to be children, are being pushed too far too soon, and, as a result, often find it hard to cope as adults. In some respects this resembles the sort of childhood experienced by those of us who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. The Scottish born Canadian journalist Carl Honoré has popularised the concept of Slow Parenting in which parents encourage children to explore the world and develop at their own pace rather than arranging a lot of ‘improving’ activities for them. The American author and journalist Richard Louv has likewise proposed, most notably through his book Last Child in the Woods, that children should spend more time in the natural world. Parents who take this approach would probably not be interested in children starting chess early: we should respect this and explain that chess is a game requiring adult thinking skills, so if they want their children to develop naturally there’s no need to do much chess until they reach the age of 11 or 12.

Here in Richmond, an affluent London borough, a third parenting style is popular. Just like the Tiger Moms, the Yummy Mummies from Richmond fill their children’s evenings, weekends and holidays with clubs and courses, giving them little time to find their own amusement. But, unlike the Tiger Moms, they don’t want their children to excel at anything but to experience as many different activities as possible. These are the parents whose children attend the after-school chess clubs in my area. Fifteen or twenty years ago, many of their children also attended Richmond Junior Chess Club, but now they don’t. If you suggest this to them, they’ll tell you that their children’s lives are far too busy to spend more than an hour a week on chess. And if they did too much chess or spent time at home solving worksheets it might not be fun so might put their children off. Now this is all very well as far as it goes, and, inevitably, running chess clubs for children from this sort of family will lead to high drop-out rates as they either lose interest or move onto something else. We need to get the message across to parents who choose this style that at some point they or their children will need to decide to concentrate on trying to excel at a smaller number of activities and try to persuade them that, if their children are talented, chess is something they should consider. We may also need to explain that excelling at anything involves hard work rather than just having fun. They may need to drop other activities in order to find time to join a junior chess club and play in tournaments. We also need to persuade them that, while it may be a good idea for Tiger Moms who are expecting a seriousness of purpose to start their 5-year-olds with chess, the Yummy Mummies who want chess to be fun would be better off waiting until their children are a bit older and have experience of simpler board games before introducing chess.

In real life, most families will practise a combination of several styles of parenting, but there’s another alternative. Back in the mid 1970s, at about the time Mike Fox and I started Richmond Junior Club, I read a book about an unconventional family whose high achieving children had been brought up using very different methods. Their children were, on and off, home-schooled (very unusual at the time) and brought up in a highly child-centred way, based partly on the theories of Maria Montessori. Like the Tiger families, the children were encouraged to excel, but it was the children, not the parents, who made the choices, and the parents’ whole lives were devoted to their welfare. Over the years I’ve met many families who, while not going to the lengths to which this family went, and usually operating within the system, have encouraged their children to excel at chess because it was what their children wanted, not because it was what they wanted for their children. Again, these are parents we need to encourage, not least because they are the parents who, because of their selflessness, are most likely to become involved in chess beyond their own children.

Richard James

Many years ago, before I was paid to teach chess, I worked in the market research industry. One thing you learn from working in market research is how to ask questions.

We can ask questions where the respondent chooses from a list of possible answers. These could be fact (“Are you male or female?”) or preference (“If there was a General Election tomorrow, which party would you vote for?”). We can ask questions where more than one answer is possible (“Which newspapers did you read yesterday?”). We can ask open-ended questions where respondents can, if they choose, give many answers (“What do you like about this car?”). We can also use Likert Scales to determine strength of feeling (“Do you strongly agree, slightly agree, neither agree or disagree, slightly disagree or strongly disagree that chess should be taught on the primary school curriculum?”). We can then analyse these answers by various demographics: it’s long been a standing joke in the industry that all market researchers are broken down by age and sex.

If we’re devising a chess course for young children based on worksheets we can also ask different types of question. Typically, most questions will be task-oriented: checkmate in one move with the queen, for instance. By making the task less specific we can make the question harder: we might specify “checkmate in one move” but not the piece to be moved. We could use the same position to ask “Find a knight move forking king and queen”, “Find a knight fork”, “Find a fork”, or “Find the best move”.

We can develop our students’ depth of vision by moving then on, when they are ready, from mates in 1 to mates in 2, 3 or more moves. From one-move tactics they will learn two-move tactics and gradually learn to tackle puzzles of increasing depth and complexity.

Indeed, many worksheet-based courses are based almost entirely on this sort of puzzle. But perhaps we’re missing a trick here. There are other types of question we can ask our students which will train different chess skills along with providing a wider variety of activities to make the course more stimulating and enjoyable.

Task-oriented questions are ideal for tactics training and developing depth of vision. But there’s more to chess than that. Defending is just as important as attacking, but it’s very hard to find defensive questions where there is only one correct move. Children in the early stages of their chess development also need to learn about safety and practise finding safe moves. We might want to test understanding of positional play at a very basic level. We also want to develop our students’ breadth of vision along with their depth of vision.

We can do all this and more by using multiple choice questions: a question type with which most children will be very familiar from school.

If we’re teaching young children we start by keeping it simple: just two choices. As children develop we add a third option, then a fourth option. Young children usually find it very hard to consider more than one move at the same time. Multiple choice questions will, by their very nature, get children into the habit of doing this (and if they’re too young to do this, I’d argue that they’re too young to be playing chess). We present a simple position and offer a choice of two moves. We might at first specify the criterion to be used to make a choice, but later on we might not. Perhaps one move is safe and the other isn’t. Perhaps one move meets our opponent’s threat but the other move doesn’t. Perhaps one move is positionally desirable (1. e4) but the other isn’t (1. h4). Perhaps one move is a winning tactic but the other isn’t. Almost any position in any game can be used in this way to produce a multiple choice question.

While simple task-oriented questions are ideal for developing tactical ability, multiple choice questions can be used for very much more than this. They’re also more realistic: when you’re playing a tournament game you don’t get someone coming up to you telling you there’s a mate in 2 there.

We can also take this concept further. A popular feature in many magazines invites the reader to predict the moves in a master game. You receive points if you find the same move as the master, or an alternative good move.

We’d like our students to be able to play a game of chess against a knowledgeable opponent on a regular basis, but if there’s no one suitable at home, they won’t be able to play enough to improve. So we give them “How Good is Your Chess” exercises which parents can work through at home with their children.

To start with, these will be very short games, maybe 8-12 moves, and not necessarily played by masters. Many very low level games are suitable for beginners. In some cases it will be good to ask questions from both sides of the board. We might start with simple two-choice questions but at some point we’ll also include some open-ended questions where several moves might score points.

One of my projects at the moment is to produce coaching materials for beginners along these lines. I’d be very interested to hear from any fellow chess teachers who might be interested in producing material along these lines.

Last week I looked at how the Morning Group at Richmond Junior Club was organised between about 1996 and 2005. This week I turn my attention to the Afternoon Group.

My partner in running this group was Ray Cannon, a strong amateur player who had also been involved in coaching at the highly successful Central London YMCA chess club in the late 1970s and 1980s. As you see, we didn’t have fantastically strong players as coaches, and neither of us was naturally comfortable standing in front of a class with a demo board. But we were both almost obsessively efficient about learning everything we could about our members and keeping track of all their games and results. I’ll repeat what I said last week: brilliant organisation is much more important than brilliant teaching. Good organisers can find good teachers, but good teachers can’t find good organisers.

The main purpose of the Afternoon Group was to enable ambitious young players to play games with a variety of openings and time controls in as close as possible to tournament conditions.

Each half term featured an opening or group of openings. We ran a three-year cycle of ten openings or opening groups: Ruy Lopez, Other Open Games, French Defence, Sicilian Defence, Other Semi-Open Games, Queen’s Gambit, Nimzo Indian and allied Defences, King’s Indian and allied Defences, Other Queen’s Pawn Games and Flank Openings. Some of these openings were used every year, some twice in three years and some once in three years. Booklets on each opening or group were published, the last page of each giving the first moves of 18 sample variations – these are available for free download at chessKIDS academy . Our members were introduced to each opening or group through a Coach and Play session: a short lesson followed by two games, one with each colour, against opponents of similar strength in which they were encouraged to consult the booklets and, if they chose, select one of the variations from the back page.

Integrated with this were two Grands Prix, running from September to July: a 30-minute Grand Prix and a 10-minute Grand Prix. Twelve afternoons each year were devoted to the 30-minute Grand Prix. In these sessions members played three 30-minute games during the three hour session, against three different opponents of similar strength to themselves. Pairing cards were used to ensure that, as far as possible, within each half of the season (6 events) no one played the same opponent more than once. Half of these events were freestyle and in the other half they had to play the openings they’d learnt about a week or two before. Points scored in these events were accumulated over the season with cash prizes awarded at the end.

Eleven afternoons were devoted to the 10-minute Grand Prix. Five of these events were freestyle, the other six, again, were with the Openings of the Half Term. For the 10-minute fixed opening events we cut up the back page of the booklet and placed them in a ‘hat’ (actually a chess pieces box): the players drew out of the ‘hat’ the variation they had to play in their game. This Grand Prix was run in three sections with promotion (70%+) and relegation (-30%) between divisions. GP points were awarded based on the percentage scores and accumulated over the season, with prizes again being awarded at the end.

For a time we also ran a Puzzle Grand Prix six times a year, with positions selected by Ray Cannon, in which participants had to find the winning move in twelve tactical positions. Again, points were awarded for solving the puzzles and prizes awarded at the end of the season.

Other activities on Saturday afternoons included Simultaneous Displays, usually once a term against IMs or GMs, endgame sessions, slowplay sessions, 5-minute tournaments, and, during the holidays, chess variants such as Exchange (Bughouse) and Kriegspiel.

We also ran two individual weekend tournaments a year: a London Juniors qualifying tournament with an added U18 section in the Autumn and a club championship in the Spring.

In addition to this highly structured environment there was a club rating list and a club games database. The rating list was updated regularly using both internal and external results, Ray Cannon performed an invaluable service by obtaining results from RJCC members in many tournaments in London and elsewhere. We used a pseudo-Elo method of calculation, with an extremely crude but seemingly effective iteration to take into account the assumption that many players in our rating pool were improving and few, if any, were getting worse. This list was used as a basis for team selection and board order for EPSCA and other events.

All games played in the Afternoon Group at 30 minutes per game or more and in the top section of our weekend tournaments were recorded on duplicate scoresheets, entered into ChessBase and, from about 2000 onwards, analysed with Fritz and published in the Members Zone of the RJCC website. I currently have a database of almost 16,500 RJCC games from 1977 onwards, with another 500 or so from 2006 when I was in the process of leaving the club, awaiting entry. Through this database we knew a lot about our members, how well they played, their opening repertoire and their strengths and weaknesses. This again helped us with team selection as well as enabling us to provide feedback to our members and their parents.

But times change, and the club had to change as well. The morning session was no longer viable due to a combination of an increase in Saturday morning football clubs and an increasing demand for private academic tuition which often took place on Saturday mornings. One result of this was that in the afternoon group there were fewer children interested in playing seriously and more who saw it purely as a social club where they could chat to their friends. The club had to move on, and, for various reasons, I had to move on as well, only to return last year. The club is very different now, inevitably so, but there are still lessons to be learnt from our story.

This is the first of two posts outlining the format used by Richmond Junior Chess Club during the decade from about 1996 to 2005.

Although a number of our members over the years became IMs and GMs this was never our priority. Instead, our aim was to introduce children to serious competitive chess, and encourage them to continue their interest, regardless of the level they reached. Our success over the years (and we’d spent 20 years developing our methods) was not due to the quality of our teaching, of which we did very little, but to having a very tight and efficient administrative structure, to knowing each of our members individually, and to being aware of everything that was going on in the chess world, so that we could recommend tournaments to our members and keep track of their results. Perhaps it also helped that I like most children, and, for some reason I never quite understood, most children seem to like me.

Contrary to what most people think, successful junior chess programmes, whether in clubs or in schools, don’t require good teachers so much as good administrators.

The Morning Group ran for two hours: from 11:00 to 13:00, later changed to 11:30 to 13:30 as the demands of Saturday football clubs and other activities increased. This section was for less experienced players of Primary School age (up to 11). We expected children to have learnt the moves, either at home or at school, and to be able to play fluently, although we could provide some limited assistance for those of a lower level. Typically, we’d have round about 75 players on our lists for this group, and we’d usually have about 40 of them present. We were closed in August and for one or two weeks over Christmas, but open the rest of the year: about 45 weeks. My colleague in leading the morning group during this period was IM Gavin Wall, one of our earliest members back in 1975/76, who has been a professional chess teacher for many years.

When children arrived they were greeted with a puzzle on the demo board, usually taken from Ray Keene’s Saturday column in the Times, which was of an appropriate level for this group. For the first 15-20 minutes children had the chance to meet their friends and play casual games while we welcomed new and prospective members and spoke to their parents.

We then called everyone together for the lesson. First, we went through the puzzle on the demo board. Then there were announcements: welcoming newcomers, results of Richmond teams, news of forthcoming tournaments and so on. Then came the main lesson, usually based on the Opening of the Week.

One of the principles of RJCC is to give children the opportunity to play a wide range of openings. Left to their own devices, children will play countless rather dull games with the Giuoco Pianissimo and Spanish Four Knights: we wanted to move them away from this. In the Morning Group all tournament games started with the moves 1. e4 e5. There was an annual programme which ran from September to July, with two or three weeks on each variation, and while it helped if you started at the beginning it didn’t matter too much if you came in half way through. We started at move one, then introduced 2. Nf3 Nc6. We then moved onto the Four Knights, encouraging 4. d4 as well as Bb5 or Bc4 (they learnt to meet this with Nxe4). We continued with 3. Bc4, showing them the main lines of the Giuoco Piano and the Two Knights, including the famous Fried Liver Attack. Then onto the Ruy Lopez, which took several weeks, and then onto the Scotch Game. In the Summer Term we introduced the concept of Gambits, playing the King’s Gambit and its close relation the Vienna Game, and finally, as a special treat, our favourite, the Danish Gambit. For the last few weeks children could choose any of the openings starting with 1. e4 e5 that they had learnt over the year.

After the lesson the children moved into their divisions to play tournament games. The divisional system was the main focus of the Morning Group – and we also used the same system, with minor modifications, in Primary School chess clubs. In the RJCC morning group there were usually about 4 or 5 divisions of about 15 players each, constituted using our internal rating system, of which more later. Newcomers would join the lowest division unless we already knew about their playing strength from elsewhere. The divisions were run using all-play-all playing charts (which are available as part of the chessKIDS academy schools download package) so that within the life of the division children would play as many different opponents as possible. After a few weeks, when the regular attenders and faster players had played most of the other members of their group, we produced a new rating list and restructured the groups with promotion and relegation.

The divisions also gave us an opportunity to introduce clocks and notation: the top two divisions used chess clocks (30 minutes each for the first game, but towards the end of the session we’d play quicker games) and the top division also had to record their games, which we would then, if time allowed, go through with them.

Between games, and at the end of the session, we ensured that children had a basic endgame knowledge – simple King and Pawn endings, basic checkmates and so on.

Every term the children who had reached the top of the top division would be invited to join the Afternoon Group. Children who reached Secondary School age would usually also move up in September. We were flexible in allowing children to move up earlier if they had older siblings in the Afternoon Group or if they couldn’t make the Morning Group.

So we’ve ascertained that if we want to encourage young children to learn chess we need to encourage their parents to help and support them. Children who just play once a week at school will make little progress and soon drop out. At the same time, I know from many conversations I’ve had over the past few months that there are a lot of parents out there who want to help their children but don’t know where to start. In most cases these are parents whose own knowledge doesn’t go far beyond how the pieces move.

Where do they turn for help? At present, at least here in the UK, there’s nowhere they can go for impartial advice given by someone who understands education and child development as well as chess.

Let’s first of all assume that parents don’t just want their children to learn chess as a parlour game but want them to take chess seriously, either because they want their children to improve their cognitive and non-cognitive skills though chess or because they want them to have the opportunity, if they choose, to become serious competitive players.

What we want, then, is to provide a course which will enable parents to learn more about chess themselves and then monitor their children’s progress. The course needs to be based on sound pedagogic principles appropriate for a typical child.

Let’s look for a moment at two Japanese teaching methods which are also very popular in the West and see if they can help us devise a suitable course. I’m referring to Kumon maths and language teaching and Suzuki music teaching.

The Kumon method, as you may know, involves children working at home completing worksheets of increasing difficulty.

From the kumon.co.uk website:

“Your child will begin at a level they are comfortable with, determined by an assessment at enrolment. By completing easier work in the initial stages of study your child will achieve from the start, building confidence from a solid foundation. From this easy starting point your child will progress steadily, completing a short piece of work every day. They will study at their own pace, and at each stage work will be tailored to their individual needs. Every new assignment will be slightly more challenging than the last, and with this gradual progression, your child will be able to acquire the solid study skills they need to become an advanced learner. Through focused and directed study, your child will learn to master each topic. They will need to complete their work with a certain degree of speed and accuracy before they can move on to the next level. This not only builds a growing sense of achievement, but enables your child to tackle more challenging work with confidence.”

The idea of step by step progress through worksheets sounds very much like the Dutch Steps Method and other similar courses used in Russia and elsewhere. (For various cultural reasons which I might outline in a later post it wouldn’t be so easy to use Steps in its current form here in the UK.) It won’t be for everyone, and it needs to be complemented by practical play, but I believe such a course should be developed for those who wish to use it.

Yes, many children will find it boring, but look at it this way. If you want to become a good pianist you have to practise your scales over and over again. If you want to become a good tennis player you have to practise the same shots over and over again. Both of these can be very boring. Speed plus accuracy equals mastery, according to the Kumon people, and this is certainly true of chess.

There’s also much to learn from the Suzuki method of teaching music. Here, from the britishsuzuki.org.uk website is what they say about parental involvement:

“Parents have an active role in the Suzuki Method. Rather than being seen as a liability and kept out of lessons, parents are expected to attend lessons, to take notes and to practise with their children, most fully in the early years. It is not necessary for a parent to be able to play the instrument themselves. The teacher will show them all they need to know in order to help their child. Indeed, many parents have been so inspired helping their children, they have taken up music study themselves.”

And this on practising:

“Children learn to speak their language competently because they speak it every day. So music should be practised every day. Of course, this kind of commitment is difficult to make and Suzuki understood this. He therefore said: ‘Only practise on the days you eat.’”

One of the problems with primary school chess clubs is that parents are not involved. In my experience, parents pick their children up from outside the building and you rarely if ever get the chance to speak to them, let alone involve them in their children’s learning.

If we want to encourage children to start chess early we need to establish a Kumon/Suzuki type chess system for those parents who want their children to take the game seriously but are not necessarily themselves strong players. This means firstly a course, and secondly a network of chess centres where children can visit for assessments and assignments and to meet and play with other children on the course.

You can see my first attempt at the first stage of such a course at www.chesskids.com/newcourse/journey.pdf. At present it’s free so if you’re interested, download it and use it as you wish. I’ll be writing about this in more detail in a later post.

At a party on Boxing Day I met a former professional footballer, his wife and 13-year-old son. There was a chess set out and the father challenged me to a game. I took White in the first game, won a piece early on and had no problem converting. The second game, though, was different. After a good opening I contracted some weak pawns and eventually just about managed to escape with a draw a pawn down in a rook ending.

Later on I played his son, and something similar happened. Again I won a piece quickly on the white side of a Ruy Lopez, but unlike his father, he resigned at once and turned the board round. I managed to win the second game as well, but only after a long struggle. He told me after the game that he usually beats his dad because he knows his weaknesses. It was clear that both father and son were more than competent players who would be welcomed by any chess club in the country.

Now this may sound surprising but there’s one fact I’ve so far neglected to mention: the family are Bulgarian and have been in England a couple of years. The father told me his son had received training in Bulgaria up to the age of 11 but hadn’t played since coming to England. Instead he’d been concentrating on sports as, like his father, he’s a talented sportsman.

There are a number of cultural reasons why it’s difficult to run a successful (and by ‘successful’ I mean that a significant number of children will become competent players and continue their interest beyond the age of 11) primary school chess programme here in the UK and this is one. In Eastern European countries, I suspect that many adults, even if they don’t play competitively, are reasonably competent players with a basic understanding of what the game is all about. Here in the UK most parents who try to teach their children chess know little more than how the pieces move themselves.

While I was playing the father, his son was engaged in a game of Monopoly with three younger boys whose parents were hosting the party, and who had received the game as a Christmas present the previous day. The children were clearly enjoying themselves, but, more than that, were learning a lot from it, and not just about capitalism. By playing together they were developing social skills, with the older boy helping his three younger friends. They were also improving their maths skills by working out the sums of money involved and trying to give the right change. This is clearly a family that enjoys playing board games together, and quite rightly so too. This, I suspect, is much better for young children’s cognitive development than sitting in front of a screen. There was a Scrabble set on the table, as well, which looked as if it was much used. Again, children will learn a lot from Scrabble. They’ll improve their spelling and vocabulary, develop their maths skills by adding points and multiplying double and triple scores, and pick up some strategic thinking. Playing any or all these games will be, at a low level, beneficial to children, and it may well be that children will gain more benefit from playing a lot of different games rather than concentrating on being very good at one game.

Now you can treat chess in exactly the same way, just as a parlour game, and that’s absolutely fine. Learn how the pieces move, go away and play. But in Eastern Europe they take a very different approach: chess, as a serious game, not just as a parlour game, is part of their culture. It’s all very well putting compulsory chess lessons at the age of 5 into Armenian schools, because many of the parents will be able to help their children at home, but trying to do the same thing over here in the UK will just end up putting most children off chess because, without parental support, it will just be too hard for them.

It seems to me that we have two options: we could concentrate on promoting chess in secondary schools while establishing a network of junior chess clubs to cater for younger children who want to take chess seriously and have supportive parents. Or, if we want to promote chess in primary schools, we need to get the message across that, if you want to do well, you need to put a lot of effort in, just as you would if you wanted to excel at, for instance, playing the piano, or playing tennis.

I had piano lessons as a boy. I didn’t get very far, but far enough to give me a lifelong interest in classical music. My parents didn’t play the piano themselves, but they encouraged me to spend time every day practising my scales and arpeggios as well as the pieces my piano teacher had taught me. We need to provide parents with materials that will enable them to help their children on a daily basis even if they know little about chess themselves. Probably only a small minority of those children who learn chess while they are at primary school will take this route, but we need to recognize that there are parents out there looking for help. And providing that help is what I’m trying to do at the moment.

Vojin Vujosevic asked why we teach chess. My answer, like Nigel’s, is very personal. It’s also very simple. Chess saved my life, so I could do no less.

This, you see, was the boy I was. I was the weird, friendless kid who sat at the back of the class. The kid who was too shy and nervous to speak to teachers and who rarely spoke to other children. The kid who was the worst in the school at every sport. The kid who wasn’t allowed to stay for school lunch after a meltdown on his first day. The kid who hid from the bullies in the far corner of the playground at morning break. Today, kids like me get diagnosed with something like Asperger Syndrome and Developmental Coordination Disorder, but in those days there was no help or support. You just had to get on with your life.

Let me take you back 52 years: Christmas Day 1960, the tenth Christmas of my life. When I woke up I found a small plastic chess set on the tree. Red and white pieces in blue plastic. I’ve no idea why my parents thought I might be interested in chess, and I don’t think they really knew either.

I quickly became obsessed with the game and as I went through secondary school the chequered board played an ever greater part in my life. At the age of 15 I played in my first tournament and joined a local chess club. By 1972, when I finished my studies, I didn’t know how, given my lack of social and communication skills, I was ever going to get a fulfilling job or make real friends. All I knew was that, whatever else I did I had to keep on playing chess.

That summer, chess was on the front page of every newspaper as a result of the Fischer-Spassky match. Suddenly, everyone wanted their children to learn the game. My parents’ friends asked if, as I played chess, I could teach their children. Teaching was the last thing I wanted to do. I’d spent thirteen years being bullied at school, and had every intention of having nothing to do with children for the rest of my life, but I’d learnt that things were much simpler if you said yes, so reluctantly agreed.

My chess club was, in the meantime, being invaded by young children who wanted to play chess but were too young, too weak and too noisy, so in 1975, along with another club member, Mike Fox, we started a junior club on Saturday mornings. We must have been doing something right since, within a few years, we had a lot of very strong members, several of whom became GMs or IMs and a number of whom are now professional chess teachers themselves.

Sharing my love of chess with children gave my life meaning and purpose, so I was excited when the Richmond Chess Initiative was formed in 1993, giving me the opportunity to promote chess clubs in local schools. But it soon became clear that there was a big difference between after-school clubs and Richmond Junior Club. The RJCC members were, by and large, serious about improving their chess and had very supportive parents. The players in the school clubs were mostly very weak and only interested in social games. Their parents often only signed them up because it was a cheap child-minding service. It worked up to a point because we were able to feed the stronger players through to RJCC, but as the years went by, fewer parents were prepared to let their children play more than once a week.

When I started a lunchtime club at my old primary school I asked myself a question: if I had joined a club like this at the age of 7, would I have played, taught and written about chess as an adult? Almost certainly not. The children who start young and do well always have highly supportive parents who are often players themselves. My parents were not chess players. They would not have wanted, nor been able to learn enough about chess to help me and they wouldn’t have understood the importance of my having help. I would, of course, have been too young to teach myself. There would have been no Richmond Junior Chess Club, no Complete Chess Addict, no chessKIDS academy, no Chess for Kids and you wouldn’t be reading these words now. And, less important to you perhaps, but more important to me, my life would have had no meaning. By encouraging primary school chess clubs where children just played once a week during term time, I was, in a sense, taking my own life away from me.

I’m eternally thankful for the way junior chess was run in the 1960s. I’m eternally grateful to my parents for not showing me the moves until I was old enough to teach myself in order to progress and not putting me into competitions until I was old enough to appreciate and learn from the experience on my own.

So, in brief, I decided to cut down my chess commitments and go away to search for a better way of teaching and promoting the game to children. A way which prioritises giving a long-term passion to a few children over giving a passing interest to a lot of children. A system which will work for children whose parents who want to help their children even though they themselves are not interested in chess. A method of identifying children whose lives, like mine, might be transformed by chess. Most of all, something that would have helped the boy I was.