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How many games should my child play everyday?

2/12/2017

1 Comment

 
The younger  your child is, or the earlier stage your child is at, the more games s/he should play. My answer is 5-10 games, ideally.

When your child is young, such as 6-8, they need a lot of exposure to chess to gain experience quickly, and they have time at that age. People learn chess by making mistakes. The more mistakes s/he makes, the quicker s/he learns. Understanding rules or theory is not enough. S/he needs real game experience. If your child only plays one or two games a week, it will take her/him at least 5 more times to progress as a child who plays 5 games a day.

5 games a day takes about 1 hour. One or  two games might be longer, but most are short. If you say that you don't have 1 hour to spare, then you should lower your expectation and just let your child have some fun.

It's not easy to ask a child to play 5 games a day, especially when s/he has other toys to play. It takes a little bit of strategy and persistence. I initially asked my son to play 10 games a day. He executed for a few days, then start to rebel. He just procrastinated playing until bedtime. So we reduced the requirement to 5 games a day. But soon he 
procrastinated again and began to strike. And he didn't want to play because he had lost too much. Everyday we just nudged him to play a few games. Sometimes he did, but sometimes he just didn't want to play. But we never gave up. Recently he started to win more again, and he became happy to play. Now it's much easier to tell him to play 5 games.

1 Comment
Chris Pederson link
4/19/2021 12:25:23 pm

I like how you said that you learn to play chess when you make a mistake. Perfect players don't learn anything. And in turn, can lose due to arrogance.

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    Having been a chess parent for more than 10 years himself, Coach Andy will answer questions about chess, chess education, scholastic chess for chess parents from his own experience and lessons. 

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