For some more chess candy, here [1] is a video of Magnus Carlsen, current world champion (and arguably the strongest player of all time), playing a bunch of exceptionally strong players in a 2.5 hour blitz (3 minutes for each side) session while also giving some exceptionally insightful commentary.<p>[1] - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjv1-14-SuU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjv1-14-SuU</a>
As a fellow lover of the game of Chess, and owner of several hundred Chess books, this is a great little starter book. I'm always fascinated at how Chess can completely satisfy my need for intellectual stimulation and competition, and it never gets old. It has the ultimate replay-ability factor. I fully expect to play and study the game for the rest of my life. Thank you for being delusional like me. :)
I don't understand the appeal of chess for the average player. Unless you are advanced (over 2000 elo) there is nothing really "deep" about it. It's like solving simple puzzles and you have to think like a computer, simply evaluating moves and responses. As GM Ben Finegold said, when you show a sub-2000 player what he did wrong he's not surprised; he just didn't see it, didn't calculate it.<p>Yes, if you reach 2000 elo the game becomes very strategic but 99% of people won't reach that due to not being able to play thousands and thousands of games and/or not doing so early enough in their life.<p>Can you play just for fun when you are below 2000? Yes you can but it's not much fun because in most games players will blunder and at that point the game pretty much gets decided; you can blunder at any point, you can never relax, you can never play a move and be confident that you didn't blunder. The constant struggle to be ultra-focused on your calculation quickly wears you down and makes the game tiring and stressful.
When teaching Go, a popular mini-game is capture-Go, with the winner being the first to capture an opponent's stone. But these Chess mini-games gave me an idea for an even simpler one.<p>Starting from an empty board, place your stone so that it's not adjacent to any opponent stone. The first player unable to do so loses. I guess it could be called Avoid Contact.<p>This is first of all a good way to learn the distinction between 4-connectedness and 8-connectedness., while avoiding the intricacies of captures. But it can also teach players a bit about forming territory, since building a chain 2 steps from the edge creates a safe space for your own stones.<p>Now that I think about it, this is so obvious that it should already be known. If so, does anyone have a reference for it?
A nice small book to introduce someone to chess, especially the minigames. I’d like more of them. I know of one, but don’t know the name of it. You start with all black pieces on their positions and then with only one white knight (whoever you want, it’s symmetrical) you try to take all the black pieces in the lowest number of moves. My niece showed me this small exercise but I can’t recall the name if it and I was unable to find it online. On my todo list, to create a simple webpage with this mini game (along with other small/easy ones) where young players do practice and also keep their scores/time on a leaderboard per game ;-)
To OP: I was just looking into simple chess puzzles for my son (checkmate in two etc), so this popping up on HN front page is excellent. Many thanks for your work! Would you mind also providing an epub version of it?<p>Apparently, there's also another booklet on your homepage, "How to Teach Your Child Chess" [1]. Will look into that one as well.<p>1: <a href="https://andytrattner.com/img/pdf/teach-chess.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://andytrattner.com/img/pdf/teach-chess.pdf</a>
This is great, it reminds me of an old Bobby Fischer book I had years ago that taught chess by studying endgames first, instead of openings, which is similar to these minigames. I like that these minigames are more focused on exploring chess, than just simulating possible endgames.
This is a helpful little book, so thanks @andytratt. One thing I think you should add in future editions is an illustration for en passant. You illustrate things like the knight move but IMO en passant is harder for beginners to understand without an illustration.
"Even though chess has been around for well over a
thousand years, good introductory teaching doesn't exist.
So far, nobody has survived chess baptism without scars.
Are you ready to join me in making history?"<p>Hyperbole much? Guides, books, teachers have been around as long as chess have [1] so to suggest that none of these provide a 'good introductory teaching' is somewhat hubristic.<p>1. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Ram%C3%ADrez_de_Lucena" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Ram%C3%ADrez_de_Lucena</a>
A year or two ago I bought my nephew a chess board/game and since then I've been struggling figuring out how I can teach him the game effectively. He seems to prefer playing on ipad/phone because he can see the legal moves.<p>I'm going to use these mini games the next time we play to help him learn the piece movements a litle better. This is great!
I’ve been trying to teach my 5 yo kid to play chess. He’s very enthusiastic but there seems to be so many things to learn so he sometimes feels overwhelmed. Today I’m going to test some of the minigames in the book! Very nice, thanks for the author :)