Free Chess Lessons

As we are at the beginning of a new month, my chess students this week are working on checkmates. I prepared 30 exercises that end in checkmates, although in one case checkmate was not forced from the study position. Those 30 are more than my students will get through in a one hour lesson.

Here is a sample:

The first comes from Philidor. The queen and bishop maneuver is one you should know well.

Alas, his opponent could have held out longer. What if he had played 20...Ke6 or 20...Kf7?

 Now, your move

A few follow a theme:

Then, there is a nice finish usually credited to Lucena, but he likely copied it from a source that no longer exists.

Nice. Thank you for sharing this with us.

Fine post. Cheers! 

z, are you still teaching history along with this?

Good presentation! . . .

hi

Whatever I teach, the history seems to pop out as part of the content. It’s sorta how I’m wired.

New week (the week begins on Friday, due to the schedules of my students).* As it is the second week of the month, the focus is on endgames. For the past several days, I have been playing positions on my iPad and my desktop against Stockfish, Hiarcs, and Komodo. These positions all come from Encyclopedia of Chess Endings, vol. 4 (1989).

Number 4 is simple.

I have a total of twenty exercises, two derived from play against the engine and numbers 1-14, 26-29 from ECE. I anticipate that my students will struggle to get through ten exercises in the course of an hour. Ready to hand will be my solutions against the engine, annotated to show where I could have improved. 

Here's a sample:

This one is derived from Grigoriev's composition.

My students this past week worked on tactics that were mostly defensive in nature. I started with some of Siegbert Tarrasch's early games and his annotations in Dreihundert Schachpartien (I have an English translation). In some cases, his annotations point out a critical defensive resource or an improvement on how he played. In other cases, Tarrasch's was not better until much later in the game than he thought.

We start with the positions that I extracted, play them out, and then look briefly at the source games.

1. Black to move

2. Black to move

3. Black to move

And one of the source games, annotated.

Nice, good to see some solid chess content on the forums ,

you are right. now, i know of this topic because i'm friends with z here. but, as anyone that knows me knows, i do not know chess. i am not qualified to respond to many posts where it is about chess. 

having said that, i am surprised at the lack of responses to this and other topics that are about the game. i wonder if the site has become kid-centric.

As we near the end of the month, it is time to do some work on openings. The plan is to race through ten whole games in a one hour lesson, all that began with an Evans Gambit. Most are nineteenth century games. Here's a sample.

As a new month begins, we return to endgames. This month's lesson was inspired by my failure Friday night during the  World Open Game 7 Championship. After my opponent threw away a win, and then missed equality during my counterattack, I had the opportunity to exchange into an ending that was clearly winning for me. Somehow, I blew it.

Continuing the theme of blown endings, my opponent found the right sacrifice to reach a drawn pawn ending, but then failed to hold it.

After the wrong capture, I was lost in this endgame, but in the end my opponent returned the favor.

Now, try this one. I made the wrong move, but my opponent gave me a second chance. I did not blow it twice. This online game was part of my local chess club's weekly meeting.

Thanks!!!

i am familiar with this feeling.

Minor piece imbalances in the middle game and endgame form the lessons for my private students this week. We start with critical positions where an error was made. Three of my own tournament games are the source. In the first I had a bishop that was superior to a knight, winning the ending easily. That was in one of the Morning Membership blitz tournaments held here on chessdotcom.

In the second, my knight was superior to my opponent's bishop. The game was played in the World Open this past weekend.

In the third, my opponent's bishop pair dominated my knight and bishop. But, there were places where I might have defended more stubbornly.

This little game was published in The Chess-Monthly (April 1882), where the editors indicated it had been taken from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Happily, the chess columns of the Globe-Democrat are online at Chess Archaeology.

This exercise is from The Art of the Checkmate by Renaud and Kahn. However, they get a few things wrong. They have it as Paul Morphy's game, when it was played by his uncle Ernest. They have it as a game played at odds, but White should have a rook on a1. I like it without the rook, though, so present it as  such. See historical discussion at https://www.chess.com/article/view/ernest-morphy-chess-king-of-new-orleans

Very good 👏🏻