How to Teach Chess in Modern Age

You should be warned upfront, this New Age method does NOT start off with the moves.

Think about it. Throughout history, modernity included, wars are won by use of Fire, or Striking Power. 

As in classic warfare, the role of troop movement is only to get the opposing army out of balance, so as to create weaknesses in their (dis)position that could be attacked by smart use of Force. Mobility is just a vehicle to apply Force more effectively and efficiently against the foe (check the work of British strategist Liddell Hart, Strategy, 1941).

If this is so, one may quite naturally ask, Why we don't start teaching chess (which, as you are well aware of, is just a replication of real warfare), by introducing Force, or Striking Power FIRST, actually before the Moves? It makes perfect sense, does it not?

Well, Caissa, our chess muse, just as a good fairy, made it possible. She made our life much simpler and easier by getting chess men move along the very same lines as they shoot Fire down (think, in contrast, Football — twenty-two men are ALL moving at the same time in ALL and yet unpredictable directions with the ball also moving no one knows where — folks, isn't chess, thanks to Caissa, much, much easier game to play?). 

So, my dear chess friends and teachers, forget about the Stone-Age-old teaching with the moves first at Square One. (And by the way, teaching the moves first is responsible for the outbreak of contagious, chronic chess diseases among beginners. They are called chess myopia and board blindness, the real culprit for poor board vision affecting millions)

Excerpt from Aaron Nimzovich's How I Became Grandmaster article, Shakhmatny Listok, 1929 

Now, let's all together see how we could get rid of the old and make the way for the Modern Age to enter early chess education!

With no further ado, let's get started!

Chess Lesson One for New Age

Chessboard geometry. Show the student there are four lines, horizontal, vertical, and two diagonal ones, crossing through each square on the board.(but corner squares with three, of course). 

Striking Power. Place Rook on the board. Explain the student how Rook shoots along the two lines, vertical and horizontal ones. Get them use their index to help the brain reinforce the simple idea (very important at this point in order to support visual-spatial intelligence and to build good working board vision later on). Ask them to count how many squares the Rook is controlling (fourteen). 

Use of Striking Power. Attack. Place a Pawn on the board. Tell the student, the Rook is now Attacking the Pawn. The Pawn is Under Attack, therefore threatened and in danger of taking out (all these are already well known concepts even for a 4-year old learner — teacher's role, using Socrates method, is just to make connections to the student's previously acquired knowledge and ideas).

Body Effect. Additionally, explain to the student that Pawn is cutting off Rook's line of fire. It is body effect (Körperwirkung, ger). The square behind the Pawn (forget the chess notation for now) is Not Controlled by the Rook.   

How Rook Moves. Move Pawn from the original square to a new one where it is Not under Rook's attack. 

The Student are Discovering by Themselves How Rook Moves !?! Ask the student whether the newly positioned Pawn is under Attack. Of course, not. Now, an extraordinary moment is most probably arriving. Ask the student to Move the Rook in order to Attack the Pawn. From my experience, three out of four students do it correctly! 

GM Tisdall loves most the way how the student learn the Rook move Without being told!

Exercise. Set up a couple positions to check out whether the student's board vision is working fine. Start with Rook and two enemy pieces. Ask the question, How Many men are under Rook's attack? One? Two? None? All of them? Then, add more pieces. This will improve their board vision and awareness.

Bishop Introduction. Using the very same methodology, explain how Bishop is working along its two diagonals. Absolutely no need to be repeating what you've just seen for the Rook (include a little exercise, too!)

Now, It's Already Time to Play, Folks! After learning about how Rook and Bishop act in chess (which may take fifteen minutes, or so), set up the following position for a mini-game to play. Whoever takes the opponent's piece first, wins! (read more in detail how this mini-game is to be played with the student here)

End of Lesson One

.

Final Considerations

Even such a simple 2B vs 2R mini-game is very rich from the educational point of view.

In reality, Lesson One structured this way helps the student grow familiar with all the three main constituents of a System (everything we know of is a system, or part of system, and chess is one complex system, too).

These three components are,

Members of the system with their attributes. Chessmen have only three of these qualities, a. Power effect, b. Body effect, c. Mobility (all three of them are covered in Lesson One with 2B vs 2R mini-game)

Relationships, or Functional Connections the system members get into through their interplay during life of system, thus forming a dynamic Structure serving some purpose.

There exist only four elementary relations, or contacts, in chess as defined by GM Yuri Averbakh in his Chess Middlegame: Essential Knowledge), a. Attack, b. Restriction, c. Protection, d. Interposition, or pin.

(Our 2B vs 2R mini-game covers three out of four basic contacts, attack (there are two pieces involved in contact), restriction (also two), and interposition (when three pieces get in line)) 

Funny, Averbakh's piece contacts b, c and d. above can all be logically reduced to only one — attacking contact! which is why it is introduced the earliest possible in my Lesson One. 

(In contrast, FIDE First Year of Study Manual mentions the term attack, in passing, only on p. 68 (?!?). Yet another highly acclaimed and, frankly, one of the best teaching methods around from the Netherlands, Stepping Stones, starts with the elementary piece contacts, such as attack, only on p. 46. Good Lord! My students get it right away at Square One, on Day One.)

System Mission and Purpose (read chess Strategy). The 2B vs 2R also brings this ingredient to the table. It has well-defined purpose that is achieved through B+R interactions.

(As per Frank Lloyd Wright teachings, Form is Function, and Function is Form. Using chess jargon, Structure is Strategy, and Strategy is Structure) 

Stroebeck 1823. Chess education became compulsory. Children carry their chessboards with them to school 

.

Now, let's compare the merits of both the classical the-moves-first and New Age method.

1) Looking back at the three System constituents, the former covers only one of the three piece attributes, the piece movement. No Relationships. No Purpose. Plus, there is so much new information and "technicalities," such as detailed board and pieces info including the value of pieces, board notation, recording the moves, draw rules, perpetual check, stalemate, castling, en-passant, etc, etc. This approach is bringing up an overwhelming amount of new information resulting in utter confusion among the ranks of the beginner. No wonder such an approach is responsible for causing poor board vision. It also stops the vast majority of beginners from moving any further beyond the "the-moves-knowledge" where, unfortunately, their chess development draws to a close.  

2) the New Age method covers all three System components, not only the moves, but also striking power and body effects, plus structure and piece relationships (read more here and here) and ends, purpose, intentions.

The new method also features, double attack, geometrical motif, the two ways (out of five) of how to parry enemy attack (by fleeing, and capturing the enemy piece); next, it is also a starting point for a development of a properly crafted mindset from its initial blank slate, "Always watch out for threats," "Always look for targets for attack," "Always do a quick move sanity check."

Learning is far from being just accumulation of knowledge, it is, more importantly, the way of thinking, the proper mindset. The New Age teaching and learning paradigm recognizes the importance of developing a properly cultivated chess mindset. To tell the truth, this is the real basics of chess, not technicalities, such as how pieces move and castle. That is why all unnecessary and unproductive facts and info for building working mindset are deliberately avoided.

The use of mini-game at Square One does tell you that starting to play full-board chess right after showing the moves is a Big No-No. The other, clearly, is the-moves-first.

* * *  

Well, quite an achievement for Modern Era Lesson One, don't you think? 

Congratulations! You've just witnessed Chess Square One reinvention, possibly becoming a pioneer in setting new frontiers for chess teaching and learning!

Addendum

Here's another Lesson One for your review, the WGM Susan Polgar's way from YT, Chess for Kids! GM Susan Polgar Teaches Chess The Easy Way (sic). She was the 1996-1999 World champion. Weight it up against the Modern.

Further reading:

New-Age Challenges Susan Polgar

.

.