Beginner's Club: This Week

Many of the young students in my after school club have only begun playing chess when they joined the club. Others have more experience and more skill, but very few have played in tournaments and with limited success. My focus in these sessions is teaching elementary skills and cultivating enjoyment of the game. Most sessions begin with a short lesson that consists of a small number of problems on the demo board, or a short game. Sometimes, I show a simple technique and ask them to practice, such as building a shrinking box to force checkmate with heavy pieces.

This week, I pulled two checkmate exercises from the Facebook group Chess Teachers & Learners.

The first was presented as a difficult checkmate in one.

White to move

Obviously White has overwhelming force, but the stipulation is that there is a mate in one.

There are many possible checks, including some that would be illegal. One young student immediately suggested Bb3+, so I pointed out that the bishop was pinned by the queen. Beginners need to learn that pieces pinned to their king cannot move off the rank, file, or diagonal along which the pin occurs. Although this bishop cannot move, it still defends the h7 knight from capture. But, as we will see with the solution, the immobility of a pinned piece reduces its power.

The correct answer took me half a minute when I saw this position on Facebook because I subconsciously rejected moving the pinned queen. Then, I saw that the rook attacking the queen is also pinned.

With the young students, we looked at every possible check except the correct one and saw why it does not achieve checkmate. Then, a student saw the correct answer, 1.Qb3#.

We moved on to the second problem--a mate in two.

White to move

This one proved difficult. The students tried several ideas. I stressed the importance of the pin on Black's pawn by the queen to help. After we had spent fifteen minutes on the lesson without finding the answer to this problem, I had the get chess sets and play chess, leaving the position on the board.

They played for 30-40 minutes and started to seem a little restless, so I brought them back to the demo board and showed them the solution (it turns out that there is a second solution that I missed).

1.Qd4 is an elegant move that forces Black to move a rook, the capture of which delivers checkmate.

1.Rd7 is the alternate solution that I missed.

Then I set up a position from William Lewis, Elements of the Game of Chess (1822) that I use with some frequency (see "Teaching Elementary Checkmates"). It is mate in five.

White to move

Students were directed to work in teams solving this. If they found the correct solution, each member of the team would earn a chess pencil. Several came close.

After they struggled a bit with simple forcing moves that were not forcing enough, I offered some hints: find a move that leaves Black only one legal move, force the defending king to remain in the quadrant of the board in which it begins (of course, I had to explain the word quadrant).