The Opposition. Or, How to Teach Chess
The Opposition.
Or
How to Teach Chess
Phase One: The Opening
"Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise.
In my end is my beginning." -- T. S. Eliot
The point of disagreement, really, was whether we follow the didactic styles of Capablanca or Fischer, or, indeed, of Jeff. With that as a baseline, we agreed certainly on the importance of teaching the rook and pawn checkmate, avoiding dwelling to much on opening; yet none present agreed that the lesson should begin where I insisted it must: the opposition.
When your king takes a bold step in front of the opposing king, after the fray of the chess battle has left the board devoid of pieces and most pawns, and by doing so forces the opposing king to move toward an unfavorable position. You stare down your opponent, and your opponent blinks and steps aside as you march toward victory, because no choice is left.
Hollis argued, quite justifiably in a sense, that the opposition does not play a part in many games at the level of our students, and I for my part argued that knowing how to win a king pawn endgame (or, indeed, force a draw), allows you to see positions far in advance that you know will be winning, and thus set goals to achieve them. And, even if I don't still argue that the best place to begin with beginners is to teach how to win and force a draw using the opposition in a King 1-pawn v King endgame (but then again, it is hard to argue against the move you have already played), my audience was indeed the beginner who was sitting at the board across me with whom we had just finished analyzing a game the best we could from memory, but also Hollis, who is playing at a level slightly above mine right now, and Jeff, the chessmaster, the Sifu of the Founding Fathers' Chess Collective, where Hollis and I are assuming the role of instructors.
The secret to beating a Sifu is knowing a Sifu. And, as it is my explicit goal that everyone in the Founding Fathers' Chess Collective beat Jeff, and beat him often, let me reveal to the collective what I know about Jeff: his PhD specialty was in the history of post revolutionary France. Do you have any idea how bloody of a time this was? Beginning with Marat in his bloody bathtub, during the decades where Britain was trying unsuccessfully to retake the Jersey Shore from my ancestors, France was a free for all of ravaging takeover, where little local despots took control of little pockets while elsewhere others lawlessly ran amuck. Then suddenly Napoleon shows up and every rube out on the farm that's tired of all the nonsense is ready to sign up and follow him on his quest to conquer the whole earth. What sort of mind would chose to focus on such an era of history? Sure, one might say the same about my own focus on Ælfrædian England, but at lest that epoch—bloody as it was as Ivar þe Boneless's heirs tore their way over the Umber—had a bold hero who emerged from frailty to end conflict and spark a cultural renaissance. All you really have to do to beat such an opponent is compose a long convoluted sentence within an already circumloquatious paragraph that snakes down a series of sinusoidal lines (have you heard of the Sinusoidal Earth theory?--it is my nomenclature for the vision of the earth as described by Dante in the transitional cantos between Hell and Middle-Earth and Middle-Earth and Heaven—Dante was of course one of the inspirations for Galileo to gaze at the stars as he did, and the Sinusoidal Earth theory is not at all opposed to Galileo's findings, which is why it should surprise no one that these two great Florentines were both condemned on the same spot in the Uffizi [where my friend Joe and I condemned each other in 1998] and both are now—forgiven by their beloved Church—entombed there) that writhe around in a fashion that might be best adjectivally described as serpentine. The next time I play Jeff, I'm going to pretend I'm William Faulkner.
Image you have a memory of some battle, where all of your forces, and all of your enemy's forces, have been slaughtered. Your loyal Knights have done their duty for your side, and fallen nobly with meaning behind their fall. Your swift Bishops no longer cut across the battlefield with their penetrating gazes, nor do your rooks keep their firm control of ranks and files. Even your Queen has fallen for your cause, and more sadly still, no hopeful pawn—any of which's promotion could ensure victory—remains on the field, except one. Before that pawn stands the enemy king, also bereft of his army, lacking even a pawn, resolute on stopping it's advance. Then you take one step forward. Stare the enemy straight in the eye. And he moves. That is the opposition.
Phase Two: The Middle Game
"Back and forth, I sway with the wind
Resolution slips away again
Right through my fingers, back into my heart
Where it's out of reach and it's in the dark
Sometimes I think I'm blind
Or I may be just paralyzed." -- Faith No More
The second of three games I played today at the the pre-foundational meeting of the Founding Fathers' Chess Collective was against this guy named Patrick. If learning the opposition is the first thing I insist upon from my chess-didactic perspective, the second is this: write down your move and analyze the game later.
Here is the Game:
[Event "Didactic Match"]
[Site "Founding Fathers' Chess Collective"]
[Date "2021.12.15"]
[White "Patrick (student)"]
[Black "Doug (teacher)"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
[Termination "Perpetual Check']
[Mode "OTB"]
1. e4 e5
2. Nf3 Nc6
3. Bc4 {Patrick considered d3, but I advised him against locking in his bishop. He also considered Bb5, and we discuss the ramifications of these two moves} Nf6
4. d3 d5
5. Bb5 xe4
6. d4 {a blunder...the best move is certainly capturing the pinned Knight. In the post game analysis, we talked a lot about pins} xf3
7. Qxf3 Qxd4
8. O-O Bd7
9. c3 {the better choice is taking control of the d-file with the rook, allowing development with tempo, keeping black on the run and preventing queen-side castling} Bg4
10. Qg3 {Patrick would have gained a Bishop for a pawn had he allowed the Queen trade, or better still gained a Rook by taking the pinned Knight} Qb6
11. c4 {again, while should be exploiting that pinned knight} O-O-O {now I control the D-file}
12. Nd2 Bd6 {setting up a discovered attack on the queen}
13. h3 h5 {I'm going all out with an attack on Patrick's King, intending to sacrifice my bishop for the open h file, which already has one of my rooks placed nicely upon it. My plan is to eventually get the other rook over there and checkmate Patrick via the h-file, or force him to lose his queen in the process of defending}
14. xg4 e4
15. Qh3 {Patrick initially missed the discovered attack on the Queen, but I allowed him to take that move back} xg4
16. Qc3 Bh2+
17. Kh1 Be5 {demonstrating the awesome power of the discovered check}
18. Kg1 Bh2+
19. Kh1 Be5
20. Kg1 Bh2+
1/2-1/2 {I will leave the last few moves to your own analysis 
}
While this was going on, Jeff was teaching some dude at another table, where he was no doubt teaching him how to make rude comments about his opponents mother while he contemplates exchanging pawns in the center) while Hollis while teaching Abby, because who wouldn't want to be teaching Abby?
Phase 3: The Endgame
"O Lord, oppose those who oppose me. Fight those who fight against me. Put on your armor, and take up your shield. Prepare for battle, and come to my aid. Lift up your spear and javelin against those who pursue me. Let me hear you say, “I will give you victory!” Bring shame and disgrace on those trying to kill me; turn them back and humiliate those who want to harm me. Blow them away like chaff in the wind— a wind sent by the angel of the lord . Make their path dark and slippery, with the angel of the lord pursuing them. I did them no wrong, but they laid a trap for me. I did them no wrong, but they dug a pit to catch me. So let sudden ruin come upon them! Let them be caught in the trap they set for me! Let them be destroyed in the pit they dug for me." -- Psalm 35
Abby, Juliet, Patrick, Hollis and I were just sitting around talking. I played Patrick again without recording and ended up overwhelming him with a pawn storm then Hollis played him again while I was wandering out by Granite Creek, marveling how the water sounded different today for the snow that had fallen last night. "We haven't had an ice storm like that in a few years," Jett—one of the Founders of the Founding Fathers' Collective—told me when I inquired about the regularity of such a weather event as we saw last night. Jett was outside repairing the fence poles which had become uprooted in last nights frigid wind. I'd had just been over at a friends' house just up the creek right before, whose old-timey outhouse door had blown open during what might have been the same gust that took down the fence. And, having shared the experience of repairing property damaged by an ice storm, I suddenly felt Jett would be more than happy to let my pawn promote.
So there was nothing left to do for this first training session but go toe to toe with Hollis. Again.
The third most important lesson for my system of teaching chess (again, with all deference to other systems) is this: make a plan, and envision the manifestation of a plan. This is when magical things begin to happen, when suddenly some outcome you had only dreamed about as you develop your pieces begins to come together, and suddenly appears, as if out of nowhere, on the board.
Hollis and I emerged from the opening, having early on exchanged knights in a standard line of the Caro-Kann, Hollis's preferred opening as black. My own head still reeling from my loss to him in the final round of our blitz tournament on Sunday, where he surprised me with the Scotch Gambit, of all things, leading me to spend way too much time on the opening and eventually losing a Rook and Pawn endgame where I allowed his King to penetrate my pawn line on b7, I was not only resolute on redeeming myself, but also on applying what I've been learning recently about chess.
Magnus, of course, does not see much value in studying historical chess, and who can argue with him, given his impressive series of victories. Though I still place him below Lasker, Euwe, Morphy, and Fischer, some are calling him already the Greatest of All Time. So, against his advice, I've been paying a lot of attention to his games lately, fascinated mostly by game six of his recent victory of Ian Nepomniachtchi in the 2021 World Chess Campionship Match, where Mangus forever changed the way I will think about the Rook and Knight when used in concert. I've often thought of the Queen as possessing the powers of both the Rook and the Bishop, and from thence comes her strength. But she lacks the power of the Knight. So when Magnus's Knight and Rook combo pushed around Nepo's Queen, my eyes were suddenly opened to a new world of possibilities, a new way of evaluating the chess board. So influential is game 6 of the 2021 World Championship on the Founding Fathers' Chess Collective, that the position in that game after move 131. Kh4 has become the backdrop to our club logo.
In our game today, the standard opening gave way to a middle-game fraught with attacks, exchanges, and various inaccuracies surely. Hollis and I discussed afterwards both the value of recording our speed chess games on video for later analysis and the back and forth nature of this very unbalanced game. At one point, Hollis sacrificed—accidentally, most likely in retrospect—his queen for a Rook and a Knight, somehow making manifest the sort of themes I'd been contemplating. I felt like I made him do that with my mind somehow, and indeed I had been talking earlier to Patrick about how thoughts over the chessboard can manifest into reality upon it. I later lost a bishop for a few pawns. I don't remember how it all happened, exactly, as I was in time trouble, and playing fast. I'm sure the engines would have shown the "lead", as it were, changing hands several times.
But, to make a long story less long, as my clock dipped below 30 seconds on this 5-minute blitz game, I saw an opportunity to exchange pieces in such a way that I would end up with one pawn and the opposition. I even ended up with opposition on the sixth, which Jeff had pointed out earlier wins for the player on the 6th no matter who holds it. And though I nearly stalemated Hollis because I was neglecting the complication with queening the b pawn (Hollis even said "yeah, this is a draw" as my clock ticked below 15 second and he was sitting on a full minute), but I managed to push his King out of the way, promote to a Queen, and checkmate him over on h1 with a 1.6 seconds to spare.
Epilogue: The Marketing Plan
"But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please." -- Shakespeare
So afterwards I was over at Matt's singing Karaoke, and this lady is giving me the eye. Then I remember: I was at a house party with her like a month ago where I played this dude in chess. In that game, when I had mate in one, I ripped my shirt off to that "It's getting hot in here" song to join the dance party in the living room, and talked to the homeowner about her teenaged son, who plays chess.
"Tell your friend about our chess club," I told her, "And invite her son to come play with us on Sundays. We meet every Sunday at 3pm at Founding Fathers' Collective on Granite to play, and we're starting to do training sessions on Wednesday evenings at 5. My goal for the year it is to have a school established, where we are teaching not only chess, but also academic subjects such as reading, writing, and arithmetic; geometry, astronomy, rhetoric, and music; and gardening."
"Hold on," she replied, "Let me take this down. The reason I'm taking this down is my son is 15, and he really likes chess too."
