Steps in Teaching

  With no youth tournaments or chess camp to spend my time on this summer, I advertised my services as a chess coach and took on five students. One student is a top Iowa scholastic player. This young man is almost as good a player as me will certainly be way better in another year or so. That doesn’t mean I couldn’t teach him a thing or two. We mainly spent our lessons going over the ABC’s of rook and pawn endgames and a little bit of time to smoothing out his openings.

  My other four students are beginners at various stages of ‘beginnerness’. I am not as good a teacher as my wife (a professional teacher) but when it comes to helping someone improve their chess I know what worked for my two sons which was a steady diet of slow games on the internet and then going over the games. Notice I said diet and not binge – I think playing one half hour game (15 minutes for both sides) every other day is the perfect amount of game play. The game is long enough to allow for some thought and short enough to not become drudgery. Playing a game every other day seems right for players who want to improve their chess and for parents who don’t want chess to become their child’s addiction but I’m OK with playing a game every day also. The important thing is to only play one game before looking it over. I want a quick loss to stick with the student for a day so they will remember to take their time in the next game instead of just clicking the convenient new game button and forgetting about the last game in favor of getting on with another game. I think that playing only the one game also gives the student a better feeling of satisfaction after a good game because they are forced to stop and take note of their improvement.

  I think playing a long game every other day and reviewing it will make any beginner better quickly all by itself and I tell this to any chess parent including my student’s parents. Every beginning student that has done this one simple step has shown noticeable improvement before ever working with me. The problem is playing one game every day or every other day seems to be really hard to do. Most of the students I’ve had either play one game and forget about playing until their lesson, play one game and forget about it until the day before their lesson when they play three or four games to catch up, or they just play and play and play without stopping to look at their games. That’s where I come in.

  I take a look at the games as a whole and try find out what the student is missing in their games. Most beginners either move all their pawns, move one piece until it gets captured and then start moving another piece, or get checkmated in four or five moves. I make some quick notes on the games to highlight what I liked and didn’t like about the games and then we go over the games during the lessons. I feel it’s important to point out as many good moves in the students games as I can to help build confidence and stress that what’s going wrong in the student games is a result of something they haven’t learned yet as opposed to some inherent inferiority. The student will eventually figure all this out – my goal is to accelerate the process. All my students are showing improvement. Whether another teacher could get them better faster is unknown. I'm pleased with their progress and think it in line with the amount of work they put in.

  Once the beginning students learn to bring out their pieces and not get checkmated at the start of the game the next thing that normally needs improvement is their tactics. An hour every week or every other week is enough time to show some tactics but not to teach tactics. I used to point students to tactics websites like chesstempo.com or ideachess.com. These sites are great but limited in that I can’t use them to target a specific tactic or idea a student may be having trouble with.

  This spring I ran across the Chess Steps workbooks on Amazon.com. I had heard of them before but had no reason to think I had any use for them. With a summer full of students looming I decided to take a closer look. The workbooks seemed like they would be useful and I ordered the workbooks and teacher manuals for the first two steps in order to evaluate them.

  The Chess Steps method is designed to be used in a classroom setting. There are six ‘steps’ or levels that are recommended for USCF ratings from the beginners to experts. Each step comes with a teaching manual and three to five exercise workbooks. The workbooks cost $7 apiece ($14 for step 6) and the teacher manual $15. The teaching manuals delve extensively into the process of learning chess. I’ve seen kids lose a game but be quite proud of all the pieces they captured. I have to admit I thought it was strange but the Step 1 manual explained that while beginners struggle with the concept of checkmate the idea of capturing is universal and so beginners equate their success in the game with the number of pieces they captures as opposed to the arcane concept of checkmate. Each set of workbook exercises is explained with a guide on how to help students progress past a concept they may be struggling with.

  Many of the exercises in the workbooks are fairly simple tactics but also contain plenty of challenging and unique exercise pages mixed in that stress visualization skills. Some pages require the student to map a safe route for a piece across a landmine of enemy pieces, while others challenge the student to mentally place the king on all the squares where he would be stalemated or place two pieces on an open board to make a checkmate. I have to think anyone working through the steps would see a massive improvement. I am using the workbooks to assign homework in between lessons. The varied nature of the exercises allows me to pick and choose exactly what I’d like the student to work on.

  I am so impressed with the Chess Steps workbooks I’ve been thinking about how to incorporate them into the chess club I run at St. Francis in West Des Moines. I’ve given out medals and trophies the last four years for learning basic checkmates. The checkmates are important but I had many of my second-tier students struggle last year at my youth tournaments and lose their games well before their knowledge of checkmates came into play. I may expand my ‘bribes’ this school year to include completing homework assignments from the Chess Steps workbooks. I don’t have the time or the inclination to turn the St. Francis chess club into a chess classroom or chess laboratory but the chess steps books will provide a structure for improvement for those students that want to get improve beyond what I can offer at the club.

An Excellent Chess Camp

  I had my chess camp in Des Moines two weeks ago. It was the fourth straight year I've conducted one. I started the camp when a few of the chess parents at my youth tournaments asked me if I knew of a lower cost chess camp than the $400+ USA chess camp that was then held in Des Moines. I got together with professional chess teacher (and 2012 Iowa chess champion) José Gatica and we designed a two-day chess camp in the summer of 2011. My son Matt (an expert player) helped us and we had 17 campers who paid $75 each for two days of camp, a T-shirt, some chess merchandise (scorebooks, pens, certificate, etc…), and as much Sunny D, apple juice, cheese crackers, fruit cups, and pudding cups as they could consume. We all had a great time and the camp was considered a success by all concerned. The camp was held at the West Des Moines Learning Resource Center which provided a huge room that we could split in two sections for $75 a day. The facility manager was delighted to have us and promised that next year we could have the camp there again so we did.

  I learned a lot in the first camp. I learned that kids prefer Sunny D to apple juice by a 2 to 1 margin, will never eat pepper jack cheese crackers when plain cheese crackers are available, any kind of pudding trumps any kind of fruit cup, and it's impossible to eat a fruit cup without the syrupy stuff in the fruit cups spilling all over the place. I also learned that while young players can concentrate three hours during my youth chess tournaments, 90 minutes is the upper limit of their attention watching or participating in a group chess lesson or activity. José knew that but I didn’t and ever since I've scheduled outside or activity time to keep the kids from getting bored.

  The 2012 camp had a few changes in addition to snack selections and scheduling play time. I decided to not have t-shirts and chess giveaway stuff and lowered the cost of the camp to $50 for anyone who came to my tournaments or went to José’s clubs. Matt took a job as an instructor at one of the other week long chess camps in the state so I needed a new instructor. Luckily I got Bethany Carson to agree to be an instructor. As a multiple state scholastic champion, Bethany had the chess credentials and has turned out to be as great a teacher as I suspected she would be. She's also a great role model and close enough in age to the campers that they relate to her better than José or me. I got more help when Jingyang Li volunteered the services of his son Frank to work at the camp. Frank was a talented 6th grade chess player and much stronger than any of the campers. Frank helped me drag out the snacks in the morning and clean up at night and he helped with some of the lessons. I didn’t know Frank was going to be helping until two months before the camp and I’d never seen him give a lesson so I didn’t assign him anything more to do which was a mistake. Without any specific tasks during the camp Frank acted like more one of the campers and would participate in the lectures. He was so much more advanced than the other campers that they had trouble understanding his questions and since he is about as strong a player as me I didn’t have ready answers to some of the tricky variations he would come up with when I was showing what I thought were simple examples to the campers.

  There were over 30 campers and the camp was a creative and financial success but when I went to book the Learning Resource Center for 2013 the facility manager had retired and his replacement told me that the building was under renovation and I could rent a cafeteria at a West Des Moines school as long as I would pay $25 an hour for a ‘custodian’ to be on the premises. When I rented school cafeterias for tournaments I paid for ‘custodians’,whose duties were to lock and unlock the doors and hand me a broom so I could sweep up when the tournament was over. That’s not 100% true - once a ‘custodian’ looked for an extension cord and another time one gave me some empty garbage bags to put in the trash cans after I emptied the trash. On the bright side, I found the ‘custodians’ exceptionally well read citizens who could discuss current events from ‘People’ magazine and the ‘Weekly World News’ verbatim. I was OK with the ‘custodian’ cost but then I was told I needed event insurance. While I was getting event insurance I was told I had to order my snacks through the school catering service. I was going to ask if the school would have air conditioning on but I was afraid I'd be told air (conditioned or not) would cost extra. This led me to look for a new site for the camp in 2013.

  In 2013 I was helping the Des Moines YMCA get a chess club started and they offered me 2 rooms for the chess camp. There was the room that would hold about 2 dozen campers where we had the chess club meetings and a room next door that was even larger. The day I accepted the offer to have the camp at the YMCA I received an invitation to have the camp at the parish hall at St. Mary in Des Moines but I had already accepted the YMCA offer. The YMCA was in what is considered a bad neighborhood in Des Moines (although it would be considered a fine neighborhood in my hometown of Hillside, New Jersey) which concerned some of the parents. Some were especially concerned when there was a shooting a few blocks away from the YMCA early on a Sunday morning but once it was understood that I went there every week for a chess club and that the camp wasn’t going to be held early on a Sunday morning the concerns melted away.

  I had over 35 campers signed up and had invited the players that attended the YMCA club to participate without a fee. I was looking at a full house. I’m the paranoid sort so almost every week I checked with the YMCA coordinators to make sure about using the rooms for the camp and almost every week I was assured there was no problem until the day before the camp when I was told that there was a problem and large room was unavailable. In addition to the small room I had a choice of two even smaller rooms: a nice board room on the second floor with no way for the campers to play chess facing each other or a tiny room in the back of the building that was used for computer testing and filled with computers. I chose the small room in the back and got to the Y early the next day and spent two hours taking apart the computer equipment and stacking it up in an orderly fashion and laying out the tables for what turned out to be a ‘Des Moines Chess Cramp’.

  Bethany and José and I all did lessons and lectures like the year before and Frank did a lecture on the Sicilian defense. The camp went well in a technical sense but everything was so cramped it was uncomfortable. When we put everyone into one room for the bughouse tournament there was barely any room to breathe. I brought some rectangular tables from home but even so there weren’t enough square tables and some of the campers had to use round or oval tables. I was pretty upset that I didn’t get the rooms I expected but since then I’ve seen other events at the YMCA that use the meeting rooms and they all had a fraction of the people they expected. I came to understand that it was the norm for the event plans to be much bigger than the event reality at this YMCA and when I said I was having over forty people (including parents) their experience led them to believe I would have closer to four. The people at the YMCA were sheepish when it turned out that as many campers attended as I told them would but by that point it was too late to arrange for me to use the large room. We muddled through and the camp was hardly a disaster but it wasn’t nearly as much fun for the campers and I was stressed out from start to finish.

  I hadn’t planned on doing the camp this year but I don’t plan on doing the camp any year until parents start asking me when the camp will be and then I start arranging it. That happened around February this year. I expected that I wouldn’t have as big a crowd as I had last year due to the problems of last year’s camp. In retail past experiences affect future sales and even if I was going to have the 2014 camp at the Taj Majal or Trump Towers there were going to be parents that were not going to have their children attend. A chess parent arranged for me to us the same St. Mary parish hall that I passed up last year and when I checked it out I was kicking myself for not looking at it in 2013. It is a spectacular location with plenty of rectangular tables, a large room that could be subdivided in any number of ways, and plenty of grassy areas for the kids to run around in. I did my normal advertising and ended up with 26 campers (not including 3 that signed up and didn’t attend).

  This year’s camp was smooth from start to finish. We made a number of small changes that I thought helped and helped a lot. At last year’s camp I had scheduled myself to teach a lesson at the beginning of the first day but there were so many late arriving campers that I was constantly being interrupted getting people settled in, collecting money, etc… I got smart this year and didn’t schedule myself to start the camp with a lesson and that gave me a chance to properly get the late arriving campers acclimated. I gave Frank extra responsibility this year by having him give two lessons and he embraced the responsibility. One lesson was a repeat of a lesson from three years ago and Frank could have just given it but he completely rewrote it and came up with some new twists.

  In previous years I had the students divided into an advanced and intermediate section but this year José wanted to call them the ‘serious’ and ‘fun’ group which made a lot of sense. What I called the ‘advanced’ group were the stronger campers who would go over complete games and harder concepts while the ‘intermediate’ group would go over basic concepts. Splitting the groups by ability was a good idea but calling a group advanced put pressure on some of the campers to be in the advanced group so they wouldn’t feel ‘unadvanced’. José’s idea to have serious and fun groups made perfect sense. It clearly delineated what the groups were about and was easily explainable: the serious group would spend more time thinking about complicated positions and the fun group would go over things lightly and have a few more activities. There was no pressure on anyone to be ‘advanced’ and some of the campers went back and forth as the mood suited them.

  My other little change happened the day before the camp when I went to the Staples to get my certificates printed and wandered over to the nearby Dollar Tree once I was done. I have always had a fascination with Dollar Stores where a dollar can get you anything in the store! Even with a dollar price tag some merchandise is overpriced but there are plenty of bargains. The Dollar Tree in West Des Moines even has a refrigerated and frozen food section. I saw a number of items that I thought would be good gag gifts for the campers. I got some straw hats, air filled squishy balls that lit up when you threw then, tiny wind-up toys that would walk or roll, and giant eyeglasses.

  I wanted to test the reaction to the Dollar Tree items so as soon as all the campers arrived and were settled down I sat in on Frank’s lecture to the ‘fun’ group. As soon as someone raised their hand and answered a question correctly I said ‘Hey, you’re on the ball!’ and threw them a squishy ball. As soon as I did that most of the kids started raising their hands so they could get something also but on the first camp day I was frugal and gave very few items away. One camper was talking all the time so I told him he was ‘wound up’ and gave him a wind-up fish that would scoot across the desk. That was probably a mistake because while he did stop talking the whirring noise of the wind-up fish was an able auditory replacement and he got his dollars’ worth out of the toy. On my way home I picked up more fine ‘Dollar Tree’ items and was very generous about giving them out on the second day of the camp.

  Of the four camps I've done this year's was the most fun. José, Bethany, Frank, Julie (camp nurse), and I are in our third year together and operated like a well-oiled machine. Frank has grown into his role as instructor and gave the campers another role model close to their age they can relate to. The facility was awesome, the kids bright and well behaved, the lessons worked well together, and the dollar store items added a welcome goofiness missing from previous camps. I got more positive feedback from the parents than ever but I did get a number of complaints from kids who got a hat but wanted a wind-up toy or got a giant pair of glasses but wanted a hat, etc..., etc..., etc... I told them all the same thing – “don’t complain – you got the most expensive thing in the store!” I don't know if it was a perfect chess camp but it was excellent and while perfection is a fools errand, excellence is a worthy goal.

Ninja Chess vs. Stalker Chess

 
The next big thing?

  There are a lot of metaphors for chess and I have occasion to use many of them when I have occasion to teach the game and I’ve made up quite a few myself. Many beginners fall in love with moving the same piece over and over until it gets captured and then they start moving another piece over and over and then the next piece, etc., etc., etc.. I can try to get them to stop by playing a game with them and beating them by having more pieces out than they do, but the student will inevitably decide that they lost because I’m older or a better player and not because they didn’t bring out all their pieces.

  My way of telling the student that they need to use all their pieces is to use a sports metaphor. First I find out what sport they play and if it’s basketball (for example) I ask them who would a game between a team with five players and a team with two players. Most of the kids say the team with five (every so often a wise guy says that the team with two will win if they have LeBron James) and make more of an effort to use more of the players on their ‘chess team’.

  Sometimes a really young player has no idea what I’m talking about when I ask which sports team would win with how many players so when our game is over, I point to each piece that moved (for both sides) and say that they are happy. Then I point to all the pieces that didn’t move and say that they’re sad. When I ask why the pieces that didn’t move are sad I almost always get the answer I’m looking for: they’re sad because they didn’t get to play. That usually makes my point and the players will try to move all their pieces in the beginning of the game so they can be happy. Of course this leads them to move some pawns that they shouldn’t be moving, but in my experience it is easier to get someone to stop moving their pawns than start moving all their pieces. One of my favorite metaphors is the ‘ninja move’, which is where one piece moves to expose an attack by the piece behind (that piece being called the ‘ninja piece’). This is commonly called a discovered attack. Beginning players miss this attack a lot because sensing it requires the ability to visualize the board with a piece in a different location and that skill takes time to develop. Advanced players have also been known to miss discovered attacks on occasion, possibly because of tiredness or a lack of concentration. Most of the kids I work with get the ninja analogy because the discovered attack appears out of nowhere just like ninjas in ninja movies. When I show the kids at St. Francis a puzzle with a ninja move or they pull off a ninja move in their own game, I tell them they are playing ‘ninja chess’.

  At my 2012 chess camp, I devoted an hour-long lesson to ninja moves. Here are a couple of ‘ninja chess’ examples from it:

pgn4web chessboards courtesy of pgn4web.casaschi.net

  And here is a ‘super-ninja’ example from the same lesson:
  I didn’t think that anyone would remember my musings about ninja chess and I was wrong. We had our 2013 chess camp last week and while I was giving a lesson about attacking there happened to be a spot where one player gave up a knight to get out of the way of the queen so she could unleash an attack on the enemy king. Three of the campers (one who came to last year’s camp and two from St. Francis) immediately shouted out ‘NINJA MOVE’. Not only did I think it was pretty cool, it gave me a chance to explain ‘ninja moves’ to the uninitiated and also told me that a ninja move might just be more memorable to a younger chess player than the clinical term ‘discovered attack’.

  I’m always on the lookout for different ways to describe chess and I’m not the only one. Among my chess books are titles like ‘Samurai Chess’ and ‘Chess for Tigers’. And I’m not even talking about all the chess sets with different themes like the Civil War, Robin Hood, Cats and Dogs, and even Yankee vs. Red Sox chess! I'd never play on a Yankee vs. Red Sox set unless it was against someone I knew I couldn't lose to and even then I wouldn't because what if I did lose?

  When my oldest son Matt was an infant, I used to do the laundry on Friday nights at the local laundromat and naturally brought along a small chess set and book to pass the time. Sometimes I would meet a young chess player named Jeff who came with his mother and we would play a game or two. Jeff would always take my pawn with his bishop as soon as he could and it didn’t matter if it was a fair trade or not. After Jeff took my pawn with his bishop for the twelfth or so game in a row despite my advice not to, I asked him why he kept doing it and he told me that it was because when he played a computer game called Battle Chess after each capture the computer would show a battle between the two pieces and the bishop taking the pawn had one of the coolest effects. Once I had broken the ice when either of us would capture a piece, Jeff would describe in great detail what the capture would look like on his computer screen. If only the Battle Chess creators had saved the coolest effects for captures that led to an advantage, Jeff may have become a fine chess player.

  If the ‘Falling Skies’ TV series was a little more popular I might be able to use the show as a metaphor for chess. The ‘ear worms’ that the aliens use to control human minds could be pawns (small but potentially deadly) and knights could be favorably compared to the horses for the humans and the eight-legged creatures affectionately known as ‘skitters’ since both can hop over their fellow combatants.

  I was playing chess against a visitor from Indiana at club a few weeks ago when I got a new idea of how to describe a ‘ninja move’ or discovered attack. An’ya (pronounced ‘an-eye-uh’) wasn’t castling and I kept on winning by putting my rooks opposite her king and uncovering its attack with a ninja move. I stated to explain my ‘ninja move’ concept when An’ya said ‘That’s no ninja! That piece is a stalker!’

  Out of the mouths of babes! There was my rook hanging out like a stalker, keeping an eye out for the king and just waiting to catch it alone. I didn’t have time to make a lesson for the chess camp about ‘stalker chess’ but this concept could be better suited for a book. There are already books on chess called ‘Play Chess Like a Champion’, ‘How to Play Chess Like an Animal’, and ‘Play Like a Girl’, so why not ‘Play Chess Like a Stalker’?

  Expanding the stalker theme seemed pretty easy for other tactical devices once I got to thinking about it. Instead of a fork that attacks two or more pieces at once, I’ll just call it a stabbing. Any attack that can be met can be referred to as ‘targeting the victim’ and when the attack can’t be met it is time to pounce! Forcing the enemy pieces to interfere with each other could be a strangling and any double attack with a check could be a mugging in broad daylight. The possibilities are endless. Here's an sample of what a ‘stalker’ chess lesson would look like:
  How good will this be once I polish it up? The stalker metaphor may be a little too weird to bring up when I'm teaching chess for now, but I’ll keep it tucked away in the back of my mind and have it ready for the time when stalkers take their place next to vampires, zombies, and cannibals as pop culture icons.

Conflicts In Coaching

  I have two weeks off from teaching chess at the St. Francis Chess Club since there is no school next Friday and the week after is spring break. Attendance at the club is down a little from last year. We regularly had between 40 and 50 players last year and this year 30 to 40 players is the norm. A quick eyeball analysis shows me that the missing players are the seventh graders who go to the high school for advanced math in the mornings and the very casual players who came to the club last year to hang out with their friends and stack the pieces up. Having 30 to 40 kids willing to wake up early to come to chess club is an indicator not only of what a fun game chess is, but also a sign that the way the club is set up is on the right track. The players receive buttons for demonstrating basic skills, get a tricky puzzle to solve each week, and a ladder tournament to provide a ranking to compete for. I would love to have a 15 minute lesson to begin the club but with an early morning club that has the members arrive anytime between 7:15 and 7:45 a structured lesson would be too prone to distractions. Besides, since these kids will be in class all day I see no reason to make them have to sit around and listen to me to start their day.

  I help run the chess club in return for being able to run a monthly tournament during the school year, and many of the Saint Francis club players have been competing in the tournaments. A few of the players compete in the rated section, but the unrated (or beginner section) is perfect for most of the players to get a few games in and not be overmatched. Having a Saint Francis player make the top five in the rated or unrated tournaments used to be a rarity, but this school year we’ve had four winners of the unrated section and one rated section champion. The parents like to give me and my co-coaches Tim (the 3 time state champ and life master) and Chris credit for this, but I know it’s mostly due to natural improvement as players and getting the hang of competitive chess where every game is important to the final standing.

  I like to say I teach by not teaching. It sounds very Zen and Yoda like, but there is more than a kernel of truth to it. I don’t have any philosophy for teaching chess except to try to understand what the motivation is for the student to improve and to figure out what kind of person they are (conservative, aggressive, reckless, shy, etc…). Most of the kids at St. Francis just want to enjoy playing so I try to teach them how not to lose in the beginning of the game and how to checkmate with an extra queen because I’ve found players are more likely to get discouraged when they lose quickly or they fail to win even when they get a queen or two ahead. If a player is more serious about getting better I try to get them to write down the games so I can look them over and see what they’re trying to do and how they're trying to do it. Very few players write down their moves, but when they do I know they are serious about improving. One of the Saint Francis players who always wrote his moves down is Zack. I was able to get a good feel for his style, which to put it mildly is an extreme caveman style. Zack used to always go for the four move checkmate and if his opponent blocked it, sacrifice a piece or two or more until he either checkmated his opponent or had nothing left to fight with. I tried to show Zack that by getting more pieces involved before he went caveman he’d develop better attacks and beat better players without changing his style and gave him some opening ideas to give away pawns to get his pieces out. Zack hasn’t been able to come to chess club this year because he is one of the unlucky seventh graders who gets to go to the high school for advanced math class, but he still plays in tournaments, still writes down the moves, was the first Saint Francis player to win one of my monthly youth tournaments (in February), and beat me in a casual game at a parochial school tournament.

  Not only am I helping teach the kids at St. Francis, I also have a ‘private student’, Alex. I gave Alex some lessons last summer in return for his mom helping at my chess camp and found I enjoyed it so we have continued the lessons through the fall and winter. Alex plays a few games a week on the internet and every other week I review his games and go over them with him. When I started working with Alex, he would retreat or trade pieces whenever given a chance and would hardly ever go on the offensive. Alex is very smart and is good at calculating variations so I showed him in his games how he could be a little more aggressive about getting his pieces out and pointed out key spots in his games where he or his opponent missed a tactic and asked him to find it. He would almost always find the tactic and helped me get him to realize that if he got his pieces out and looked for tactics he should be confident in his ability to out calculate his opponent and if he saw something that he thought would work to go for it. He had a setback ironically enough by winning a tournament in August. I think he felt a lot of pressure to win every tournament after that and went 4-9 the rest of 2012. I made it a point in our lessons that I saw a lot of improvement in his online games and that what happens on any particular tournament day has a large element of randomness. Alex has found a new level this year. He has gone 9-5 so far in 2013, but the thing that has most impressed me is that he is constantly on the lookout for tactics in his game and doesn’t get discouraged by a loss – he just keeps on fighting.

  My son Matt is quickly becoming one of Iowa’s premiere chess teachers. He coaches one 3 elementary schools in Ames (including this year’s K-6 and K-3 state team champions) and has a number of paying students. I’m very proud that he has found so much success and at the same time admit to taking a special delight when one of my students beats one of his in a tournament, but I’m very conflicted when players I like square off at one of my tournaments. Aside from Alex, Zack and the other St. Francis players, there are all the other players that are regulars at my monthly tournaments and chess camps that I have gotten to talk chess to over the past 2 and a half years. I just do my best to remain impartial, let the game play itself out, and be happy for the winner and sympathetic to the loser of the individual contest.

  At the February afternoon tournament, Zack and Alex were both playing. In the second round, Zack lost to Daniel, a very talented second grader from Ames who won the morning tournament and in the third round it was Alex’s turn to play Daniel. Daniel got a good game out of the opening, but Alex found a tactical shot to win a piece. Daniel posed a lot of problems even a piece down but Alex kept a cool head and won the best game I ever saw him play. Then in the fourth round Alex and Zack squared off. If Alex won he would guarantee first place and if Zack won he would set up a 3 way tie for first.

pgn4web chessboards courtesy of pgn4web.casaschi.net

  Alex and Zack both played well above their rating. It was a wild game and I would have been happy to see them draw. We had time for one more round and since the three leaders already played each other, they got to play some lower ranked opponents. Zack and Daniel won their games but Alex was spent from his efforts and lost his last round game. It was a shame he didn’t get a share of the championship but I tried to impress on him that he played his best game ever and the improvement was the important thing. He was upset with the last round loss but has started playing more chess on the internet than ever before and the quality of the games has taken another leap. I can see these two pushing each other for years to come.

Not a 'AAA' Chess Camp

The 2012 West Des Moines Chess Camp!

  After a couple of months of organizing, advertising, and preparing lessons, we finally held our West Des Moines Chess Camp last week. Last Sunday, the family took a trip to the Wal-Mart to get the camp snacks. I packed 144 pudding cups, 14 gallons of Sunny D, 4 gallons of Apple Juice, 144 packs of cheddar chess crackers, 144 fruit cups, and a couple hundred plastic spoons and cups into my groaning shopping cart and found an empty checkout line. The checkout lady noted that I sure had a lot of stuff and started asking what I needed it for, so I asked Matt very loudly, ‘Matt, how long do we have to keep them locked in the basement?’ That was the end of any Wal-Mart cashier questions, but I did mention to her that I was buying supplies for a chess camp after I was well on my way to getting out of the checkout in record time.

  I had arranged to take Thursday and Friday off from work and on Thursday morning I packed up my car with all my chess stuff and snack items under the confused, bleary-eyed gazes of my next door neighbors, who apparently were up all night assembling Marshalltown’s largest empty beer can pyramid. We greeted each other with nods of feigned indifference and I was on the road and at the Learning Resource Center in West Des Moines at 8:30. I started dragging all the supplies in when Frank Li and his dad Jingyang arrived. Frank is a talented 8th grade chess player from West Des Moines and his parents offered his help at the camp because they wanted him to be involved in some volunteer efforts and I was happy for the help.

  Jose arrived around 9 and we decided on how we wanted to split the big meeting room into 2 and arrange the desks. Then Bethany Carson arrived. I was extremely lucky to get Bethany to my guest instructor this year. She knew many of the kids already, was as excellent with the kids as I thought she would be, and as the 5 time state girls champion had their respect as a chess instructor. Jose is awesome with kids, had many of his students in attendance, and as the state chess champion had plenty of credibility with the other kids. I felt I would have my hands full not being the weak link! The campers started to arrive at 9:40, so Jose and I started greeting the campers as they came in and got them in their proper rooms. We had 35 campers and put one third in an advanced group and the rest into a beginner section. In no time, it was 10 and we were ready to start.

  Bethany was going over some of her most instructive games with the advanced players while I was giving a lesson to the beginners in how not to lose in 4 moves. It sounds like a silly topic, but at my tournaments and at St. Francis I see so many players lose to the 4 move checkmate that I thought it would be good for these campers to learn some chess ‘self-defense’. When I give a lesson, I like to engage the kids and make them speak up and share their ideas. Out of the 2 dozen kids arranged in a semicircle around me, there were 5 or 6 kids that wanted to sit on the edges and talk with their friends, 10 or 12 kids sitting in the middle that were interested in the lesson and would contribute, and the rest of the kids would drift between goofing around and paying attention. The lesson went really well and after an hour and a half we gave the kids a break and let them either play outside or stay in and play chess.

Left: I wore my cool Marvel Comics T-Shirt on Friday. Center: Frank and Bethany enjoying a rare free moment.
Right: Jose keeping an eye on the day ending tournament.

  After the lunch break, it was my turn to work with the advanced players while Jose was going over some puzzles with the beginners. I had prepared a lesson on looking for discoveries where one piece moves to discover an attack by a piece in back of it. I like to call these moves ‘ninja moves’ since the piece hiding in back gives the visual impact of a ninja appearing out of nowhere to make an attack. The lesson was going OK, but it was taking a lot of time to switch the puzzles on the demonstration board and that slowed the pace of the lesson with a delay after every puzzle. I was trying to engage the campers in sharing their ideas and it was going well, but Frank kept on finding tricks for the defender in the positions that I hadn’t looked at when I was preparing the lesson. None of the tricks made the answers to the puzzles wrong, but it made me have to think while giving the lesson and that slowed down everything more. Next year, I’m going to make sure Frank reviews my puzzles before the camp! After the lesson, we decided the kids needed to play and gave them a choice between playing a team chess game called bughouse and a speed chess tournament. It was a good idea and except for one of the campers having to visit Julie the nurse when her finger got bruised by being caught in chess clock the day ended on a good note. We cleaned up and tried to vacuum the floor to pick up what seemed like millions of cheese cracker particles, but the vacuum cleaner's filter hadn’t been emptied since the Stone Age and the motor overheated so the vacuuming had to wait until the next morning.

  I got home at 6:30, went with Kathy to walk Daisy and Baxter, watched Burn Notice and slept like a baby until Friday morning. It’s amazing how exhausting it can be working with almost 3 dozen young chess players. I was hoping to be back at the learning center at 9am, but since we couldn’t finish vacuuming the night before, I was out of the house at 7:30 with the plan of arriving at 8:45. I was halfway between Des Moines and Marshalltown (otherwise known as the middle of nowhere), when I noticed the low tire pressure light come on. I was 15 miles away from a gas station with an air pump so I just kept going along until I felt the familiar shimmy of a flat tire. I pulled over, found the little donut spare tire, tire iron, and jack in the bottom of the trunk, and changed a tire on my Kia Rio for the first time since I bought the car 2 and a half years ago. I couldn’t go more than 50 miles an hour with the little donut tire, so instead of getting to the learning center at 8:45, I arrived at 9:10. I have an AAA card and called them to see if could get someone to come out and fix my tire. They told me they didn’t do that sort of thing. I put out the day’s snacks and started vacuuming the room when Jose and Bethany arrived. I told them the story of my flat tire and Bethany’s dad Tim offered to take my tire to get fixed. I gave him directions to the Freedom Tire shop I used to get my tires at and within an hour, he was back with a new tire which I put in my car with the idea of replacing it after the camp.

  The second day of the camp went much the same as the first day. In the morning, Jose went over his instructive games with the advanced players while I spent the morning teaching the beginners some simple endings. After the lesson, I’d let the players demonstrate what they learned by trying to win against Bethany, Frank, or myself from the lecture positions. Around the hour and a half mark they started getting noisier and noisier so I took them outside to the nearby playground to work off some energy for a half hour and then took them back in for lunch. In the afternoon, I went through an endings lesson with the advanced players and just like the day before, Frank kept on trying to find tricky ideas. But this time I knew most of the positions cold and didn’t have to spend as much time working the solutions out and I got through the lesson at a nice pace. We closed out the camp with a bughouse tournament, gave out participation certificates, and said our goodbyes to the camp for another year.

  As we were cleaning up the room and packing up from the camp (the fruit cups were a big thumbs down this year with over 100 left!), Jose and I were talking about what changes we’d make for next year’s camp. Unlike last year, I‘m planning on having a camp next year because when I talked to many of the parents, I see there is a need for an inexpensive chess camp. There is no question that a lot of the families can afford a week of their summer and hundreds of dollars for chess camps like the $400 one in Des Moines in August, but there are also a lot of families that can’t. The feedback I got from the parents was outstanding and the low-cost camp is a perfect complement to my low-cost chess tournaments.

There's always some clean up, but I wasn't expecting donuts to be on the cleanup docket!

  Filled with the great feeling of a well-run camp, I went out to my car to finally replace my donut with my new tire and found out that I left my tire iron out in the middle of nowhere when I put the donut on in the morning! I called AAA to see if they could get someone to change my tire and after punching my 16 digit membership number into the phone and then having to repeat the number to 2 operators (why do they make you punch in the number if you have to repeat it to the operator anyway), I was told that since I didn’t have a flat tire, they wouldn’t be able to help me. I asked the operator if that meant that if I punched a hole in my tire with a knife, AAA would send somebody? The operator said ‘Of course we would!’ I’ve been paying these clowns for 15 years, but at that point I hung up, loaded up my car with the leftover fruit cups and other snacks, and drove to the Target store to buy a tire iron. I didn’t realize that the Super Target’s idea of an automotive department was steering wheel covers and car wax products and so I left empty handed. I got on the highway and heard on the radio about a traffic jam up ahead so I pulled off on Hickman Road to find an auto parts store. I saw an Advance Auto Parts and pulled in to get my tire iron and next door I saw a Freedom Tire shop! I pulled in and saw they were closing in 15 minutes. I asked if they could change my donut out for the spare tire and not only did they stay open late to do it they did it for free since I had bought my tire from another Freedom Tire. If I do decide to rename next year’s chess camp, the ‘Freedom Tire Chess Camp’ wouldn’t be a bad name. It would surely be a better choice than the ‘AAA Chess Camp’.

Teaching and Learning

What does an alligator dinner look like? The alligator is the tiny stuff at the top of the plate.

  I’ve been spending most of my free time the past month working on lectures for the chess camp I’ll be holding later this month with Jose Gatica and Bethany Carson. I wasn’t planning on having a chess camp this year but when the other chess camps in the state were announced, I started getting inquiries from many of the parents of children who came to my tournaments this year. Last year my camp was 2 6-hour days with a cost of $75. There are camps in Cedar Rapids and Ames this month run by the Wisconsin Chess Academy that are 5-8 hour days at a cost of around $250 dollars with lunch included (I only provide Sunny D, apple juice, fruit cups, and crackers). I thought that was pretty expensive until I noticed that USA Chess Camps is having a weeklong camp in West Des Moines at a cost of $255 for 5 3-hour days and $405 for 5 7-hour days (Lunch is not included) included). I didn’t want to leave the parents who support my tournaments the choice of spending hundreds of dollars on a chess camp or having no chess camp at all for their kids, so I made sure that Jose also wanted to do a camp and started setting it up in March.

  The USA Camp has a grandmaster on their staff and the Wisconsin Chess Academy has Fide Masters on their staff, but our camp won’t be short of star power. Jose won a share of the Iowa Chess Championship in April and Bethany is the 5 time Iowa Girls Champion, so I could be fully justified in calling my camp the ‘Champions of Iowa’ camp or something equally grandiose. Instead, I’m just calling it the ‘West Des Moines Chess Camp’. I kept the same price as last year, but we offered a $25 discount for anyone who came to any tournament Jose or I put on this past year. With 2 weeks to go, I have 31 paid campers and 30 are paying $50. There won’t be any t-shirts this year, but I’m happy to be able to offer a camp for $200 less than any other chess camp in the state. It may be 2 days instead of 5, but $200 could feed my family for 2 weeks, buy 2 ‘Big Bags’ of Cheetos Puffs a week, or get Daisy and Baxter a year’s supply of beef stick treats!

  Just because I’m having a 2-day camp and not a 5-day camp and I’m serving snacks instead of lunch doesn’t mean I don’t want to have the best camp I can. Matt had already made plans for the summer, but I was very lucky to get Bethany Carson as a guest instructor. Not only is she a very strong player, she is a product of Iowa chess and someone that the other campers can look up to as an example of what they can aspire to. I still have all the lessons we used last year but now that I have another year under my belt running youth tournaments and working at the chess club at St. Francis, I have a better idea of what players don’t know and what they need to learn to get to their next level and I’m designing my lessons accordingly. That’s part of the advantage of having campers whose chess skills I'm well acquainted with.

  I’ve been trying out some of my lessons on Alex (my new student). It was a big help to be able to preview what I’ll be going over in front of 30 people in 2 weeks. Alex would be in the advanced section of the camp and was able to pick up the material quickly and even helped me with the beginner sections by finding holes in some of my example positions, alternate solutions in others, and when he had difficulty with a concept it made me either find a better explanation or maybe remove it from the beginner section.

  Working on the camp has been a lot of work at the expense of working on my own chess game, but I’m hoping it will not only pay off with a fun chess camp, but also in my being able to see the chess board with ‘new eyes’ and I’ll be able to learn something new along with the campers.

  On the subject of learning something new, yesterday my boss took the programmers in our department to Buzzard Billy’s; a bar/game room/restaurant 2 blocks from work. I’ve never been in a Buzzard Billy’s before, but it looks like a typical Applebee’s type of place with most everything having Cajun seasoning. I looked over the menu and nothing really caught my eye until I noticed the Fried Alligator Dinner. I’d never eaten alligator before and I wasn’t paying so I decided to order it. Since it was more expensive than what everyone else was getting I offered to share my alligator with the rest of the group. While we were waiting for our meal, naturally the discussion turned to alligator and I mentioned that I’d seen my first episode of ‘Swamp People’ over the weekend. The episode of ‘Swamp People’ I saw showed these Cajun people hunting alligators in the swamps of Louisiana on boats and every couple of minutes a Cajun person catches an alligator on a hook and pulls it into the boat while his partner shouts ‘It’s a big one’ and shoots the poor alligator in the back of the head. The only redeeming quality to the show was when one of the Cajun hound dogs was sick and lethargic, so his owned cooked up a mess of jambalaya and fed it to the hound, who immediately perked up after he ate the gooey mess.

  After a few minutes, our food came and there was tiny bits of my alligator spread out to the side of the plate (to look like there was more that what was really there) with a huge bowl of coleslaw (with a spoon instead of a fork in the bowl), a pile of thick cut French fries, and 2 hush puppies. One of my co-workers pointed to the hush puppies and asked what they were and I immediately replied ‘alligator balls’. The alligator was mostly breading and what meat there was seemed pretty chewy and reminded me more like the gristly part of a steak than chicken. I learned that I don’t like alligator meat very much. All in all, I’m glad to say I’ve eaten alligator, gladder to say I didn’t pay for it, and doubt I’ll ever have it again.

School's Out

  Friday was the last day for the St. Francis Chess Club for this school year. There were 32 meetings and I was there for all 32. This is the second year in a row I had ‘perfect attendance’. I was very fortunate that the weather cooperated in letting me get to club throughout the winter in light of the 63 mile drive. There was only one day that I had to drive in the snow to get to class and none where ice was a factor. I’ve driven back and forth from Marshalltown to Des Moines to work for 16 of the past 18 years and when the road between the two towns was one lane in each direction, driving in the snow and ice was pretty scary, but once they made the highway 2 lanes in each direction it is a lot easier to drive because there is no oncoming traffic to worry about sliding into me (and me into them) and since there is 2 lanes I can go as slow as I feel like going because there is a passing lane for the more adventuresome drivers.

My co-coach Chris is fantastic with kids and shares my view that chess is great for them!

  I enjoyed teaching the kids this year. They had a lot of enthusiasm for chess and were very well behaved. I only had to raise my voice twice all year and that is when somebody broke the only rule I have which is to not keep anyone else from playing chess. Most of the time I just kept everyone focused with humor. Once 8 children were playing with their Rubik’s Cubes and I just went over to them and told them it was Chess Club and not Rubik’s Cube Club and that I was sure the Rubik’s Cube Club wouldn’t like it if they started playing chess during their meetings. I got a lot of giggles and a few off looks but I also got the Cubes put away without any trouble.

  Kathy taught my sons chess and I’ve never had any formal training as a teacher so I just tried to use my experiences to guide me in teaching chess and my experience with my kids and at the Salvation Army tells me that the best thing I can do is to get young people to enjoy playing chess and not worry about winning and losing. Then the players who just want to play for fun will be able to play without being bored by openings, pawn structures, opposite colored bishops, etc… and I can show the players who have a desire to get better and play in tournaments how to improve their game without also having to keep the attention of the casual players. If I was charging the parents for their children to attend the club I may have tried to move toward more structured lessons, but since I didn’t charge I saw no reason to force the issue.

  I used the F.O. Armbruster pamphlet as a guide to quickly teach the new players and bribed the club with pins to learn how to win with a queen and king against a king, and a pawn and king against a king, but other than that I just had the kids play in a ladder tournament or casual games and let them show me if they were serious about getting better. I strongly believe the best thing a beginning player can do to get better at chess is to play one game a day at a slow time limit and replay it and find their good and bad moves. This led me to making a rule in February that the players had to write down their games. When we had 3 weeks off in March they got lazy in writing the games down and I got lazy in enforcing the rule, but some players still wrote down the games and I put all the games I had (including my own) into the Internet with my comments. What I found from reviewing the games was that most of the players like to only play with one or two pieces and that they hang pieces and don’t take pieces their opponents leave hanging. These will be 2 of the themes in the summer chess camp and I was able to touch on these points in my games with the club members to show how easy chess can be when one side is playing with 6 pieces and their opponent is only using 2.

  For our last meeting, I thought of bringing treats and juice, but a month ago we had a wellness lunch at work where a nutritionist talked about how much sugar there is in everything we eat. As an example, he showed us the food that a health conscious person would eat in a morning. There was a bowl of Cheerios, a pint of OJ, a Special K snack bar, and a bottle of Vitamin Water. The nutritionist told us how much sugar was in each of these items and as he did so, he took out a baggie full of that amount of sugar and poured in a jar. When he was done, he had a jar full of sugar. I thought I was eating healthy by drinking a big glass of cranberry juice in the morning, 2 bottles of Lipton green tea at work, and a liter of Lipton Iced Tea on the way home but the demonstration got me to look at the sugar content and I was having nearly a pound of sugar a day! I swapped out the cranberry juice for tomato juice and water with a half a lemon for the green and ice tea and I lost over 10 pounds in a month. This convinced me to not bring in treats and snacks for the last club meeting, but when my co-coach Chris came to club with his son, he brought 5 dozen Krispy Kremes and Sunny D and Lemonade!

Left and Right: "mmm Donuts" - Homer Simpson
Center: If a player pulls off a slick checkmate, I snap a picture of it and email it to them.

  Chris was a real blessing to have as my co-coach this year. He is great with kids and is very in tune to how they think since he is also active in the Cub Scouts and Little League, so if he thought it was a good idea to bring in treats for the last meeting I’d have to say he’s more right than me. I didn’t notice any of the kids bouncing around all sugared up and that proved it to me and I’ll have to think harder on how to mix in snacks next year. We had a great last day of club playing chess and everything is now all put away for this school year. I got a few letters and gift cards from the kids and their parents which I appreciated. The gift cards will come and go, but the letters from the kids telling me how much fun they had at club and how much they enjoy chess now will last me a lifetime.

  I don’t push the club members to come to my tournaments since that would go against my core goal of getting them to enjoy chess but I do let them know about the tournaments. I had about 20 of the 58 different club members try their hands at my Saturday youth tournaments. Some only played in the free National Chess Day tournament and some didn’t have the results they expected and didn’t come to another tournament and one even stopped coming to club. That was disappointing, but the top 3 players in the club all placed in the top 5 in the rated tournaments at some point and 4 of the very young players more than held their own in the unrated section. The club members really shone in the Catholic School tournaments, where they won 2 K-6 and 1 K-4 team titles. All these kids have a host of other activities in addition to chess and my goal is to get them to be able to enjoy chess and have a proper foundation of chess knowledge to build on if they decide to take the game up again later, but part of me takes a lot of satisfaction when I see them have success in tournament play.

  It wasn’t always easy dragging myself out of the house at 5:30 to get to St. Francis by 6:45 and spending an hour setting up and taking down the tables, sets, boards, etc. but it was almost always the best part of my week. I’ve already signed to lead next year’s club and I’m already looking forward to September!

Good Friday

  Thursday Night at the Marshalltown Chess Club wasn’t one of my better days. The club started OK when 2 of the scouts showed up to finish up their merit badge requirements and one stuck around to play a game with Seth, a 9 year old who showed up at club last week for the first time and enjoyed himself so much his mom bought him a membership so he could play in our weekly tournaments. Then it got even better when the 2 Mormons who came to visit me on Monday decided to accept my invitation to play chess. I sat down to play with Elder Shoenfeld while the other Elder watched. When we used to have our club at the Wal-Mart in the summer, 2 of the Mormon elders were chess regulars one year while they were in town on their mission trip. Ironically, one of the elder’s favorite chess variation was called suicide, where you have to take your opponents pieces if possible and the winner is the player that loses all their pieces first.

  The elders and scout left when it was time to start the tournament and my day took a sudden nosedive when I played Matt Kriegel from Tama, who was playing in Marshalltown for the first time since last December. I played Matt in the second round, went pawn grabbing in the opening before castling and went down in flames in an attack to my uncastled king when I defended poorly trying to hang on to my extra pawn. It was the first time I’ve lost to Matt in 12 tournament games (10 wins and 1 draw). I felt pretty crummy about losing to Matt, but I’ve beaten better and lost to worse and hopefully I’ll learn to look more carefully the next chance I have to grab a pawn with my king in the center of the board, although this game seems eerily similar to the pasting I took from Tim Harder at Big Money Blitz last September.

 
7:15 - early arrivals

  On Friday morning, I left the house at 5:40 and headed off to St. Francis for chess club before work. After an entire school year of attendance between 40 and 60 kids, there were only 2 classes during the 5 Fridays of March and last week’s attendance was a year low of 36. Since a lot of the parents would no doubt be travelling for the Easter weekend, I wasn’t expecting a huge crowd but that doesn’t matter to me. The kids and I have a great time, teaching the club provides a venue for my monthly tournaments, and having fewer players gives me a chance for more individual instruction.

  I got to St. Francis at 6:45 and started setting up the room for the chess club, which involves putting away round tables, wheeling out the square tables, setting up 25 to 30 boards, and laying out the pens, scoresheets, and other materials for the players. It takes me about a half hour. While I was setting up, a well-dressed vaguely familiar guy came in the room two or three times. The first time he looked at me, the second time he asked if there were classes on Good Friday, and the third time asked what time the kids would show up for chess.

7:30 - The action
picks up!

  It turned out the guy was from KWKY, the Des Moines Catholic radio station. The station was broadcasting in the next room over. They had done this earlier in the school year (that’s where I remember the man from) and invited all the kids to come over to be on the radio just before the 8:00 break where they had them say a ‘Hail Mary’. He must have been waiting to see if the kids were going to show up before extending a similar invitation. At 7:15, Will showed up. Will is a very talented 8 year old player who beat the top player from SE Polk High School at my March tournament. We sat down to play but then Ryan showed up so I had Will and Ryan play. As more players started showing up I paired them off to play against each other, trying to avoid mismatches. When we had 10 or so players, the radio man came back and asked if I’d be willing to talk about the chess club on the radio at 7:55 and bring the players in to be on the radio also. That was OK with me.

 
7:45 - Full house!

  More and more players showed up and there were 32 players by the end of the club. With so much time off in March off, I’ve gotten lax about having the kids write down the moves and now only one or 2 players are doing it, but that’s going to change next week. I’ve been reviewing the games that have been written down and posting them on the internet along with my comments, so hopefully that will be an incentive.

  At 7:55, the radio man called us in to the room they were broadcasting from. When the hosts were back on the air, they said the chess club was there and asked me to talk about the club. I mentioned that these kids all get up early on Fridays to play chess and then asked the kids to shout out what times they got up. I talked a little more about the chess club and then the host told the kids that he played chess also and encouraged them to keep playing. The hosts had the kids say an ‘Our Father’ and then it was back to chess. We finished the club and then the radio man came back in with a station banner and wanted to take a picture of the chess club. Some of the kids were so wrapped up in playing that they finished their games, but the rest of the kids and I managed to get the picture taken and a picture was emailed to me within an hour.

  Like almost every Friday, I had a great chess club and was so energized that I breezed through the day at work. I’ve made every St. Francis chess cub so far this year and with only 7 Fridays till the end of the school year it looks like I’ll have perfect attendance 2 years in a row. It’s a lot of fun and I can see the improvement in many of the kids. I hope to be asked back again next year to coach, but with 60 kids in and out of the club in a year, there’s always the chance I’ve offended the child of some influential parent and there’ll be a ‘thanks but no thanks’. Irrespective of what the future may hold, I've had a blast teaching chess at St. Francis this year.

Scouting for Chessplayers

  Last year, the Boy Scouts added Chess to their list of merit badges. Chess and the Boy Scouts have a long history. Bobby Fisher even wrote a chess column for Boys’ Life magazine (the official Boy Scout Magazine) in the 1960’s. I was asked in January to be the chess merit badge counselor for the Marshalltown Merit Badge day yesterday and I quickly agreed since you can never tell where you'll find the next members of the Marshalltown Chess Club!

  The Boy Scouts are careful about who they associate with, so I had to take their Youth Protection training and agree to a background check. Their website listed the numerous requirements for the merit badge. It required the scouts to be able to discuss the history of chess, the rules of the game, how to write down the moves, opening principles, and to be able to solve chess puzzles. The website also had a section for counselors, telling us to make sure the scouts met the requirements and not to just pass them for showing up or making a minimal effort. I took the requirements, added internet links to where the scouts could get all the information they needed and sent it off to Aaron (the scout leader who recruited me to be the counselor) so he could pass it along to the scouts who wanted to try for the chess merit badge. I also let Aaron know about our club was available in case any of the scouts wanted to get some practice in before the examination.

 
The RACOM building
in Marshalltown

  Like I wrote last week, I hadn’t hear from Aaron since February so I wrote to him on Monday to see if anyone was going to try for the chess badge. Aaron wrote back within an hour to let me know he had forgotten to write but there were 17 scouts signed up to attempt to get their badge and that I should be there at noon for the 1 PM start. On Saturday, I put together a giant tub of chess sets, score sheets, clocks, and pens and was at the RACOM building at noon. RACOM is a Midwest telecommunications company that has their headquarters a block away from the Salvation Army building. I’d never been in the building before and can only assume that one of the scout leaders is well connected with the company. I brought my 50 pound tub up 4 flights of stairs until I found the scout leaders only to be told that the chess class would be in the loading dock on the first floor. Luckily there was an elevator so I didn’t have to lug the 50 pound tub back down the stairs! I got to the first floor and started setting up chessboards on the 4 x 8 foot tables that were provided. There were 4 or 5 scouts that helped set up the boards and then they started playing. The scout leaders wanted to get started early but some of the scouts hadn’t shown up early so I just played some games and answered questions until I started at 1 as scheduled with 13 scouts. Aaron’s son was trying for the merit badge and Aaron and some of the other parents stuck around to watch the proceedings.

Early attendees
getting in some chess.

  I think some of the scouts thought they were just going to play chess all afternoon and get an easy merit badge. If they were, they got a rude awakening because I was determined to make sure they met all the requirements set forth by their organization and I had them stop playing and pay attention to me. First we talked about the history of chess, why the scouts think chess is important enough to have a merit badge assigned to it by the Boy Scouts, and some basic chess etiquette. A couple of the scouts weren’t paying much attention so I made sure to call on them to answer any questions I had. Then they finally got to use some of the chessboards I had set up, but only to push all the pieces to the middle of the board and demonstrate to me that they knew how to set the board up. By some coincidence, the 2 scouts that weren’t paying attention before missed putting the king and queen on the proper squares. I corrected them and we went on to the next topic.

  The next thing the scouts had to demonstrate was that they knew how the pieces moved. I put up a large demonstration wall board, set up some positions and asked them how many squares a particular piece could move to. The scouts all did very well with this exercise and some of them did better than me when I missed some queen moves. Having the demo board also got me to explain other concepts like how most pieces have more squares to move the closer they are to the center and other concepts like pins, double attacks, the relative value of the pieces and common opening mistakes. We went on to discuss the other topics like castling, the fools mate, and capturing ‘en passant’. I was convinced that the scouts understood the concepts and all 13 were on their way to earning their merit badge.

 
Checkmate with 2 rooks.

  By this time it was after 2 and the scouts got a chance to play some chess. One of the requirements was to demonstrate how to checkmate with 2 rooks and a king against a king. We set up the position on 17 boards arranged in 2 rows of tables. I took the side with the king and went around the rows of tables like a simul, letting each scout make a move when I got to them and I would make my reply before moving on to the next board. 3 of the scouts checkmated me right away, but the rest had to figure it out on the fly. I encouraged them to look at the boards of the 3 players who completed the challenge, and that helped a lot. At 2:30 I stopped the test and 4 of the scouts (including Aaron’s son) were not able to complete the checkmate. I told them they would get partial badge credit and could come to the chess club on any Thursday to complete the requirement.

 
Writing down the moves.

  The next requirement was for the scouts to demonstrate they knew how to keep score of the game so I set up a mini tournament for them to write down the moves. Some of the scouts didn’t know how to keep score so I showed them the same method I use at St. Francis which only takes 2 minutes to learn. Aaron’s son had already played 3 games with his dad and brother AND kept score so while the other scouts played, he had a chance to retake the checkmate exam (which he passed) and I went over the games with him and Aaron, showing them some things they missed and moves I thought were top notch. As the scouts games finished, I reviewed their score sheets to see how well they kept score. All but 2 players kept excellent score sheets so I started the second round of games and told the 2 players they needed to keep better score if they wanted to meet the requirement (which they did).

 
Puzzle Time!

  The second game finished around 3:30 and it was time for the last requirement, which was to solve some direct mate puzzles. I had printed out a sheet of 6 puzzles and told the players that they needed to solve 4 of them and that one puzzle was harder than the others and would count for solving 2. The puzzles were 4 mate in 2, 1 mate in 3, and a mate in 5 moves (a smothered mate) that counted for solving any of the other 2 puzzles. Aaron and one of the other parents started to try to solve the puzzles and the other scouts congregated in groups of 2 or 3 to work together, which I had no problem with. The scouts had an incredibly hard time solving the puzzles, but I told them it was not supposed to be easy and that they needed to look for checks to force the other sides' reply to execute the checkmates. Once each group managed to solve one of the puzzles they got the hang of what to look for and were a lot more enthusiastic about working on them and almost everyone managed to solve them. Here are the puzzles I gave assigned. White to move in all positions. I’ll put the answers in the comments.

Mate in 2 on the left, the double credit mate in 5 on the right.

Mate in 2 on the left and mate in 3 on the right.

Mate in 2 on the left and right.

  In the end, 10 of the 13 scouts passed all the requirements to earn their merit badge and if the other 3 take the time to come to the club on Thursday and finish their checkmates and puzzles, they’ll get their badge also. Their knowledge of how to play was pretty impressive and 2 or 3 of them would be pretty competitive in my youth tournaments. Scouts need 21 badges to become an Eagle Scout and most of these scouts won’t have a lot of time for playing chess, but one scout and his dad told me that they’d be coming to my club on a regular basis. Aaron told me he enjoyed my enthusiasm for chess and thought I made it interesting for the scouts, which made me feel good. I thought being the counselor was a good time and I was happy to meet some young people interested in chess even if some of them were there only to get a merit badge. I thought I did an OK job devising tests to challenge the scouts and objectively determine their chess knowledge. I don’t know if I’ll be invited back for next year’s merit badge examinations but if I am I’ll have a better idea what to expect, how to better tailor the session, and make chess even more interesting for the scouts.