Blog Archives - Chess Parents FAQs

Do I change coaches for my child?

7/29/2015

Yes, you do.

There is rarely any coach who can teach both beginners and masters well. You do not have a coach for life, no matter how good s/he is. When your child's skill improves, you will have to move up. This is like changing teachers when your child moves from elementary school to middle school, to high school, then to college.

Another reason for changing coaches is effectiveness. Most coaches will become too nice to their long term students, sometimes they may treat them like their own children. It would be hard to put higher demand and discipline on their students if this happens. Changing to a new coach may help put business back on track.

Third reason is playing style. Different coaches have different playing styles, so they teach different strategies. Your child may need to find a style s/he likes.

How soon should my child start to play in tournaments?

7/28/2015

6 months to 1 year. When your child is familiar with all the moves, can finish a game without any difficulty, s/he can start to play in tournaments.

There is nothing about fully ready for tournaments. S/he will learn along the way. S/he may make mistakes, such as forgets the touch-move rule, talks too much, etc. Let him/her make mistakes there, be corrected there. S/he may lose games, and s/he may cry. Let him/her do it. We grow up in this way. You don't need him/her to be a perfect model student before being allowed to play in tournaments. This is not performance on stage. This is real life!

No need to worry about tactics or strategies, let alone openings or endgames. They will learn these things later. Go there, compete, get excited, and get experience.

Is blitz good for my child?

7/27/2015

I heard that as a fast game, blitz will make my child get into bad habit and move too fast in longer games. Is it good or bad for my child?

IMHO, blitz is good for kids. Most kids don't have enough exposure to chess. If your child only plays long games, s/he will hardly find any playing opportunities locally or online. The only places s/he can play might be tournaments on weekends. That will not be enough. For any opening, or any tactic skill, one has to see it, and use it often enough to master it. Playing games once a week is definitely not enough.

For the same amount of time, for example, one hour, you may only play one long game, including your searching time. But you can play at least six 5-minute blitz, which means you have 5 more chances to practice. Yes, it can't train your long calculation skill. You have to practice that in tactic training and master game analysis.

Most top players love playing blitz, including Carlsen, and Nakamura.

Does my child need to play online?

7/26/2015

Yes, definitely. As I suggested in previous article, your child should spend 5-times of the lesson time on playing chess games. Most families don't have anyone who can play the kid for so much time. Even if they have, playing against the same person with the same style may not be very helpful in the long run. Therefore your child has to go online for a variaty of opponents.

For a very young kid, such as K-2, ChessKid.com is a good place to play. They have built-in measure to prevent anyone from talking to your child without being friends first. The interface is much simpler, and the games are slow so the little kids can have time to think.

For older kids, Chess.com or ICC (chessclub.com) are recommended. That's where everyone goes to play chess, including GMs. You can play different time controls and against players from any countries. Because a lot of adults are playing there, please remind your child that no chat is allowed other than "thank you" and "good game". You may want to monitor the account activities from time to time.

Why playing games at home is more important than taking lessons?

7/24/2015

Some students come to lessons every week, go home, do some homework but never play games at home. Their parents and students themselves think that they can handle the homework so they are ok.

Are they learning chess? No they are learning chess theory, not chess.

Playing games is critical for students' growth. We want to be better chess players, not great theorists. Only playing a lot of games can help translate theory into reality, and transform knowledge into intuition.

Playing at class is limited because the time limit of the class. You can only play one or two games at most. The time for playing games should be 5:1 relative to the lesson time. In fact, it's best that you play everyday.

Why some two-move checkmate problems are extremely difficult?

7/23/2015

Two-move checkmate has just one more move than one-move checkmate. Should it be a little more difficult than one-move checkmate?

For most two-move checkmate problems, the answer is yes. But a few, mostly human-designed two-move checkmate can be very difficult. There are a lot of such problems floating around, some may be hundreds of years old.

To design a one-move checkmate problem, there are normal 2 to 5 places that can be checked, at most 10 places which are rare. You just verify each check to confirm it's a mate or not.

For two-move checkmate problems, the designers had painfully taken care of all the variations. Normally the first move can have 5-10 choices, more when the first move is not checking the King, and there may be 5-10 possible defenses, and then for each defense you need to find the followup mate or confirm there is no mate in that variation. The paths that need to be checked may be ballooned to 10 x 10 = 100. It's not easy to find all these paths, and to remember all these paths (because you want to make sure that you have exhausted all possibilities), and to calculate all these paths.

Jumping from 5 simple checks to 100 checks is huge for our brains.

Where to find enough one-move checkmate problems for training?

7/23/2015

According to the batch training method I suggested, at least a set of 1000 one-move checkmate problems is needed. Where to find such a set?

First, you can search and collect one-move checkmate books. There are a few on Amazon, and my daughter and I will publish a new free e-book on the topic in a few weeks. If you are interested, please sign up our mailing list (on the About page) or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

Second, you can use chess software. My online store has the following titles: "Chess for Beginners: Elementary Checkmates I" and II, which have 40000 and 77000 mate-in-one exercises.

Another software I strongly recommend is "Chess tactics for beginners 2.0", which includes a side course of 900 one-move checkmate problems. It also lets you practice most basic tactics.

Third, use some websites, such as our blog: http://www.onemovecheckmate.blogspot.com

What is time trouble?

7/22/2015

Time trouble means when a player is close to running out of time, s/he has to move faster without thinking and tends to make mistakes.

Old people and players who tend to think long are more likely to get into time trouble.

Most beginners won't have time trouble because they move fast in nature for every move, so they always have a lot of time.

How to make my child slow down in his games?

7/21/2015

Kids tend to move fast, which is good because they can find ideas quickly and think quickly. They will not get into time trouble. But one side effect is that they tend to miss some better moves or miss some variations.

How to slow them down so they can think more thoroughly?

First, they themselves should realize such problems exist. If not, they will not listen to any suggestions.

Second, use some mechanical routines to slow them down. For example:

Sit on their hands all the time, only release their hands after they finish thinking and decide what to move.
Write down moves first before making the moves on board. (against FIDE and USCF rule, but USCF tournaments silently allow the practice)
Write down time used for each move, or at least the moves that take long time. (against FIDE rule, see Wesley So incident in US Championship)

Third, play more in long time-control tournaments, then slowly change their habits.

Fourth, remind them there is no need to rush in long time-control tournaments. Show them examples with your own actions:

Do not rush to find pairings. It's always crowded when the pairings have just been announced (posted on wall).
Do not hurry to finish eating food during breaks, even if the round has already started. (FIDE has zero tolerance rule. USCF never has it, 30 to 60 minutes grace time is normal)
Do not run to restroom.
Do not move right away after returning from restroom!!! (sit on hands and wait or count the clock for 3 minutes first!)

Is blindfold training useful?

7/20/2015

Yes, blindfold training is useful for chess development.

In fact, all advanced players have some level of skills for blindfold games, which come from the accumulation of long term chess training (not specifically blindfold). Even if they could not see the whole board, they can clearly see the small part of the focus, most times involving some tactic combination. They can continue calculating in their mind without looking at the board.

This is what our Tactic Workshop training targets for.

Blindfold training helps strengthen our vision. We can see more with or without board. We can see them quickly and intuitively. This is critical for everything else, including calculation or strategy planning. If we can't see, we can't plan or calculate. If we can't see a few moves deeper, we can't calculate fast enough, then we will get into time trouble often.

Playing blindfold is interesting. Some top GMs have amazing capability to play 10 to 20 games blindfold simultaneously. They have unimaginable powerful memory.