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Mrs. America showrunner Dahvi Waller speaks with Awards Dailys Megan McLachlan about what Phyllis Schlafly represents about modern America, writing American history from a Canadian lens, and why shes interested in TV projects set in the past.

Ann Coulter. Tomi Lahren. Ivanka Trump. Modern-day conservative women have a particular look about themtheyre blonde, opinionated, and influence their base with manipulative rhetoric. Before these women, the mother of all conservative blondes was Phyllis Schlafly, who up until her death in 2016, was still throwing her support behind the GOP base, including publishing a book on Trump.

Mrs. America on FX on Hulu analyzes the rise of the conservative blonde by following Schlafly (Cate Blanchett) as she aims to dismantle the push for the Equal Rights Amendment. As showrunner Dahvi Waller points out in my interview with her below, on the conservative side of this debate, you have one woman who serves as the face of the movement, whereas on the other revolutionary side, you have many faces. However, today, there are many faces on both sides.

I loved getting the opportunity to chat with Waller about her captivating series, why she chose to center the action on Schlafly, the freedom of writing Sarah Paulsons composite character, and what Gloria Steinems (Rose Byrne) late-night fridge notes say about being a woman.

Awards Daily: The show spends a lot of time with Cate Blanchetts Phyllis Schlafly. How did you decide how much time should be spent with each character? And why the focus on her, whos essentially the antagonist of the story?

Dahvi Waller: I was excited about centering the series on Phyllis Schlafly for a couple of reasons. One, I was really interested in telling the story of how our country took a sharp turn to the right in the 70s, that really set the stage for understanding where we arrive at today. And thats really a story that can only be told through Phyllis Schlafly. I think one of her greatest achievements was ironically to build up a grassroots army of politically right-wing women who became the soldiers in the Reagan revolution. That was the larger story of the series beyond the Equal Rights Amendment battle. It felt that to tell that story, we really needed to spend quite a bit of time with Phyllis Schlafly. But also, I think you keyed in to an asymmetry about these two worlds. In one world, you have one woman who was the one singular leader of the counter revolution, and on the other side of the revolutionaries, you have so many leaders. So we had to figure out how to structure the series so that were not making it seem like it was a Phyllis Schlafly versus Gloria Steinem. It wasnt at all. The two never met. But really finding a way to structure the series so that we do give many of the women who are leaders in the womens movement in the 70s their due, while still contrasting these two worlds.

AD: Theres really so much care with that, too. While I was watching, I appreciated how you balanced all aspects of the movement. You include black rights, gay rights, and really run the spectrum. Was that something you gave extra attention to?

DW: Absolutely. In telling the stories about the Equal Rights Amendment battle, I was really, really interested in telling the story not only of the birth of intersectional feminism, which really began in the 1970s, but really the struggle for the leaders of the womens movement to understand how important it is to embrace gay rights and issues of racism within the Womens Rights Movement. (Laughs) I was really shocked to discover that the womens movement had not embraced intersectional feminism from the get-go from the late 60s, but still in the early 70s, they considered womens rights something different from gay rights, which was so shocking to me. I really wanted the series and all the writers on the staff to really focus on that struggle and not shy away from it.

AD: Sarah Paulsons character is one of the few thats not based on an actual person, and she gets her own episode in Houston. What was it like to write that character who wasnt restricted to a specific history?

DW: (Laughs) In many ways, it was so liberating! It didnt involve research, like 200 pages of research documents! We really wanted to represent the homemakers. Phyllis Schlafly was not a homemaker. She was a working woman who ran a massive organization, but there were homemakers who formed her grassroots group, and we really wanted them represented and dramatized, what it was like to be a homemaker at this time fighting against the Equal Rights Amendment with real characters. That was the genesis for Alice Macray and Pamela Whalen (Kayli Carter). But because there werent that many public figures who came out of Phyllis Schlaflys movement, we created composite characters based on real women who we either had spoken to, or read an oral history, or read a newspaper article. Alice Macray is a loose composition of some members I talked to as well as a neighbor of Phylliss I came across in a newspaper article from the 70s. But because she is a composite character, we had the luxury of having her change over the course of the series. With Alice, we were able to show a character move through this decade and have an actual change in her worldview and that was really exciting. I think she also represented the every woman. We had all of these larger-than-life historical figures who were so iconic, but we wanted an every woman whos very relatable, who could be the audiences way in to this historical time period.

AD: Youre Canadian, and while this story is a part of womens history, its also a part of American history. Did being Canadian allow you to see it from a different lens, and if so, where does that come through?

DW: That is such a great question. Most people are like, Who are you to write about American history? But you phrased it in a really interesting way. I do have some street cred. My parents are American expats who emigrated to Canada. Although I was born and raised in Canada, I do hold dual citizenship. But I really didnt learn any American history until I went away to college. Since my dad is a political scientist, who focuses on American government, I did grow up in a home watching political conventions on TV, and election nights were like the World Series in my house. I really did grow up learning about American political history from my father, thats probably a great influence. You can definitely see his influences in the show. And he was my unofficial political consultant who I would call whenever I needed, to find out information about the Democratic Convention in 72 and the 76 convention. He would give free consultation, which was very sweet of him.

But I do wonder if, because you asked this and no one has asked me before, I do wonder because I was born and raised in Canada, and in a way even though I have American citizenship, I always have felt like a bit of an outsider in this country, maybe it did allow me to see events that I didnt live through here in the states with a different lens, view Phyllis Schlafly without the same kind of loaded way because its not part of my own history. Growing up in Canada, we didnt have Phyllis Schlaflys! (Laughs) And Cate Blanchett is Australian, and I think she also has this outsider perspective. We can view things maybe in a different way than if we had grown up with these stories.

AD: How much research did you do about these real people? I love Gloria Steinems little dances she does. Was that something she actually does? How did you throw things like that in?

DW: We did a ton of research. I had a researcher working with me as far back as development. Once I got the writing staff, all of us were doing research. We must have read as a group between 25 to 30 books. I think I clipped a thousand articles in newspapers. Magazines. We read oral histories. We watched footage. We went pretty deep. And one of the reasons I wanted to go deep is to get at that specificity in character that you just alluded to. Gloria Steinem tap dancing is a great example. We were reading and watching a documentary about her on HBO that she took tap dancing lessons as a girl, and that she thought she would dance her way out of Toledo. Thats how she was going to make it out of her working-class background. And for a feminist icon to also be great at tap dancing and also that be a part of her childhood and be performative when she really didnt like the limelight and to get joy from dancing even as an adult, it was such a great character detail that I wanted to bring in to the Gloria episode.

Another small character detail which came out of the research, we read a lot about oral histories of Ms. Magazine and Glorias memoirs about running the magazine. In one of her biographies or articles about her mentioned that late at night when she was the only one at the office, she would sneak food from her co-workers. What really struck me that was so enchanting is that she would leave them little notes. I thought, one, thats so relatable. Two, theres something so enchanting about that. It made me love her, so I put it into the script. The specificity of that really says a lot about her, that she would leave a note behind.

AD: Yeah, a dude boss would just take food.

DW: Hes not gonna leave a note!

AD: Women would leave notes to each other.

DW: It really spoke to what a female-centric work environment it was. Same with the Tot Lot. When I learned that there was a Tot Lot in the corner of the office, where women would just leave their children there. We dont even have that today. We had an amazing art department that built the entire Tot Lot where Margaret Sloan brings her daughter Kathleen the first day. Another detail, one of my favorites, was that it was such a startup and everything was being thrown together so fast, that some of them were working on dishwashing machine boxes instead of desks. So we actually had that in Episode 2, and by Episode 4, they had desks. Those little details, the art department was as great at research as the writing staff was. They would bring those little details into production design.

AD: Phyllis Schlaflys daughter believes your characterization of her mother villainizes her. But I think Phyllis comes off pretty good. We all manage to care for Phyllis in some capacity. What were your thoughts on that?

DW: (Laughs) What I find most interesting about a show like this, especially when you have so many versions of women all across the spectrum, from saintly and angelic to villainness, all of those types of women are represented in the show. I think its an interesting Rorschach test for our own beliefs about ourselves as women and about women in power and about our political history. Its natural to project your own belief systems onto whatever youre watching. You cared about her, [but] some women watching have seen the show and said, Shes the anti-Christ. I hate her. And then other women are like, You really villainize her! Weve heard the whole gamut. For me, its rewarding that a show can have such extreme emotional responses from viewers. To me as a writer, its quite rewarding. How you view her says as much about you as it does about how shes portrayed.

AD: Youve worked on a string of period shows, starting with Mad Men, then Halt and Catch Fire, and now Mrs. America. Is there something that intrigues you about shows set in the past?

DW: Another great question that no ones asked me. I think that sometimes its easier for us to understand or to reflect where we are today by looking at a period of time in history where we have a little bit of distance and were able to see things more clearly, than if we were to write about relevant issues in a contemporary way. In the same way that Mad Men shone a light on gender dynamics in the workplace, even today, even though it was set in the 60s. [With Mrs. America], I wanted to look at it from a post-2016 lens. I think thats one of the appeals, getting to explore this world that way. Thats fun for me as a writer.

Mrs. America is streaming on Hulu.

Read more here:
'Mrs. America' Showrunner Dahvi Waller On Viewing American History as a Canadian, Showing the Birth of Intersectional Feminism - Awards Daily

OPINION: In case you hadnt noticed, theres yet another election looming and the honeyed words of persuasion are beginning to flood forth from all points of the political compass.

Were set to be bombarded with pre-cooked talking points, what the focus groups and super-secret internal polls are saying we should be told, what the advisers are advising, and who knows, maybe a decent, fact-based opinion or two, truly held, if were lucky.

Shame this isnt Finland its population similar to New Zealands. Are you kidding? Too cold, too close to Russia and too many strange habits, like doing weird things to each other with birch twigs, they say. And they dont speak English.

But heres the thing, apparently Finland tops the annual European index that measures resistance to fake news across 35 countries on that continent.

READ MORE:* Alison Mau: An election year to make George Orwell spin in his grave* Migrant kids are 'child actors', claims Ann Coulter, telling Donald Trump not to be fooled* When politicians hijack the pro-truth 'fact check'

Warwick Smith/Stuff

Keeping a close eye on what is said during an election campaign can be a bedazzling experience among the volume of pre-cooked sound bites and occasional strongly held views.

Fake news, before Donald Trump was invented, used to be known as plain old propaganda, false or misleading information or just liesbut where Washington goes, the rest of us follow, so fake news it is now, for the moment.

We know that when Trump moans about fake news, what he is really objecting to is something he disagrees with. If only people do what he does and get the facts from Fox News then there wouldnt be a problem, right?

Fox News is an experience all right, but its relationship with the real world is way too obscure for this news junkie.

Besides, there are, thankfully, alternatives that house a smorgasbord of offerings when it comes to trying to figure out whats going on around the planet.

Meanwhile, Finland, where the government, it is said, became fed up with being targeted by fake news stories out of neighbours Russia, decided the world had moved in to something called the post-fact age.

What to do?

Teach a counter-narrative, starting in the primary schools, thats what.

Begin with why fairytales work so well and take it from there, right through the years so you end up with a generation of young adults who can critically think for themselves.

OK, here our school curriculum is crowded and about to become more so when all our schools start teaching New Zealand history, assuming they get the resources and teachers from somewhere. As another aside, how many of our schools dont already teach NZ history? A few, some, lots?

Anyway, back in Finland, the clever things have incorporated aspects of critical thinking into various subjects across the curriculum. So, its not in a silo, Critical Thinking 101, or some such, as you might see at university.

Thus in maths, for example, students learn how easy it is to lie with statistics see any politician of your choice for a working example.

In art, they learn how an image is manipulated. A picture used to be said to be worth 1000 words. Now its not so simple.

In history, among other things, they get to dissect propaganda campaigns, again a useful skill to have come election time. And in language, theres a lot of fun to be had looking at how words can be used to deceive people and how they might mislead.

It would be a good idea to wheel in George Orwell at this point, because he penned the primer on English language and politics in an essay, while his novel 1984 also contains some pretty useful pointers when it comes to seeing what can be done with words. Democratic Peoples republics are still around even now. You know, the sort of place where leaders get a 99 per cent yes vote in elections. And the misguided 1 per cent are sent off to the countryside for a spot of re-education.

All this feeds into journalism, of course, and how it is ideally practised in places such as New Zealand, where facts are sacred but comment is free is the basic credo.

To get at the facts you need verifiable information though. In journalism, there are providing sources who are traditionally rated as reliable, such as the police, for instance. But of course, we live in an age where were drowning in social media and everyones facts are as good as the next persons. And science is horribly devalued. Perhaps well hurtle back in time to when religion and magic were deemed to explain the world.

But places such as Palmerston North are a bastion of education, so it is here, and in centres like us, where the struggle is being fought out.

Some of the signs are encouraging, especially when you look at the dire state of other parts, except Finland, it seems, and see what is occurring.

Alister Browne is an experienced Stuff scribe and former Press Gallery reporter who will write a weekly politics column

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Beware politicians and their election-year tall tales - Stuff.co.nz

Chess is often described as the game of kings. And it is. But there was a time when chess was also the game of those who were overthrowing their kings. That was a time when chess was the game of dangerous radicals and revolutionaries, writers and intellectuals. It was a time when men and women used coffeehouses, newspapers and salons as we use the internet to spread once-forbidden ideas and knowledge ideas that would ultimately shatter the old order and usher in the modern world.

In all the vast upheavals of the 18th century, chess was in the thick of things. It was played in taverns and inns as well as royal courts; played by misfits and disaffected intellectuals as well as kings and aristocrats. In 1784, five years before the storming of the Bastille, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, in an essay analyzing and defending the Enlightenment, dubbed that century sapere aude," which translates as "dare to know," "dare to be wise," or, more loosely, as "dare to think for yourself."

Sapere aude thus became the unofficial battle cry of the Enlightenment. It is also good basic advice for any chess player.

Dare to Know: Chess in the Age of Reason is the latest exhibit at the World Chess Hall of Fame examines this fascinating and little-understood era of chess history in depth for the first time, covering roughly the years from 1700 through 1830. At the beginning of the era, with few exceptions, chess was a game played primarily by kings and their courtiers, as well as the clergy. By the eras end, people of all classes played in great numbers. Chess books began to be published more widely. The saga of chess in the 19th century had begun.

What caused such a drastic transformation in our beloved game? It was a natural outgrowth of the Enlightenment, a phenomenon that likewise transformed so much of the world. This exhibit includes material from the various regional Enlightenments of Europe and America, but focuses primarily on that most central Enlightenment the French Enlightenment. Most historians define the era as beginning in the early 18th century and ending sometime much later in the century, usually with the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Dare to Know includes the Enlightenment as well as both the pre- and post-Enlightenment periods.

Reinventing the world the Ecyclopdie

It is impossible to discuss the Enlightenment without also discussing the famous Encyclopdie of Diderot and dAlembert. The most famous, revolutionary, and subversive encyclopedia ever published, the lofty and audacious goal of the Encyclopdie was nothing less than an attempt gather all human knowledge, and yet at the same time, to fundamentally change the way people think.

But before all this, the Encyclopdie had set out to be, first and foremost, an encyclopedia. [Indeed, scholars still rely on it for authoritative answers to many historical questions related to 18th-century France.] The Encyclopdie was the work of its chief editor, the philosophe Denis Diderot, assisted by Jean Le Rond dAlembert and over 150 other authors, many toiling in obscurity. By far, the most prolific author was the Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt, who wrote over 17,000 articles, or roughly a quarter of the entire Encyclopdie. Diderot himself wrote well over 5,000 articles, the second-highest total.

To modern people, it may seem hard to believe that the writing of an encyclopedia could be fraught with controversy. But this one was written by a unique group of progressive intellectuals known as the philosophes, who could not help but infuse their articles with high-minded concepts of tolerance, reason, open-mindedness and egalitarian political ideas, all of which posed a bold and flagrant challenge to the authority of both Church and State. As a result, the philosophes or the encyclopdistes, as they came to be called worked under constant threat of censorship, arrest and even worse.

An enduring mystery: knight or bishop?

Chess is included in the Encyclopdie in two main places: First, in the fifth text volume (1755), under the Es (for checs, the French word for chess), on page 244, there is an article about the game, written and signed by the ever-prolific Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt.

And second, in the ninth plate volume (1771), there is an illustration of a chess set that has fascinated and confused chess historians and collectors for some 250 years. The set appears in the volume not because it was considered important to show what a chess set looked like, but merely because it was one of the typical products of a toymaker. Known as an Encyclopdie set, or sometimes as a Diderot set, few complete examples of this once-common set are still extant. It also gave rise to later French chess set styles such as the Directoire and Rgence.

The six different chess pieces are depicted in a sophisticated manner, giving both elevation (side view) and plan (top view), in the manner of an architectural drawing. One of the pieces, fourth from the left, is depicted as having a top cut into a crude triangle. Many writers have pointed out that this crude triangular cut was probably cheaper than employing a skilled carver to make horses heads, the rest of the set being turned quite inexpensively on a lathe.

Though one might expect the piece to be a knight, other information in this entry conflicts with this identification. On the comments page that precedes this plate, the third piece from the left is referred to as the cavalier, or knight, while the fourth piece from the left is dubbed the fou, or bishop. This does not agree with how the pieces sit on the board at the start of play. There has been tremendous debate over the years about this conundrum, but with access to a genuine first edition of the Encyclopdie, I believe (with all due respect to those who disagree) that I have solved it. The piece ordering on the comments page is a typographical error a misprint. The fourth piece from the left is indeed the knight.

The rise of the coffee house

Just as chess was the chosen game of the philosophes, coffee was their chosen drink. Because of the way coffee tended to sharpen the wits rather than dull them like alcohol, coffee was the obvious choice for all manner of thinkers, writers, philosophes, encyclopdistes, scientists, academics and everyone else intent on living what we would now call a life of the mind.

Today, it is almost impossible to find a decent chess coffeehouse anywhere in the world. It was not always so. Once there were thousands of them. Every major city in Europe and the Americas had countless options to choose from; there were some 300 coffeehouses in Paris alone, most of them allowing or encouraging chess and other sober games such as draughts. Many chess players today have heard of the Caf de la Rgence, and perhaps Caf Procope in Paris, but these were only the most famous.

Chess players today often tend to think of the Caf de la Rgence and places like it merely as places where chess was played, but this is a woefully inadequate view of history. If ever there were a place where world-shaking ideas flowed along with the flow of the black brew, mingling with the gentle click of the pieces, it was that venerable and much-mourned institution, the chess coffeehouse.

Stay tuned for the conclusion in next weeks article. In the meantime, learn more about Dare to Know: Chess in the Age of Reason," or see the free exhibition at the World Chess Hall of Fame, on view through Nov. 1, 2020.

Tom Gallegos is an antiques collector and dealer, independent researcher, and self-taught antiquary. His greatest areas of interest are the history of Western Civilization before the Industrial Revolution, the history of science, and the history of ideas. He has been a member of Chess Collectors International since the 1990s, though he collects in many other areas as well, including Greek, Roman and Medieval antiquities, and also participates in other collecting societies in areas such as playing cards, rare books, maps and prints, scientific instruments, and nautical antiques. Though no longer active as a tournament player, he formerly held a U.S. Chess Class-A rating, and still enjoys playing chess daily.

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On Chess: When The Game Of Kings First Became A Game Of The People - St. Louis Public Radio

Most chess players can find beauty in chess puzzles, especially ones with clever tricks in the solution.

Check out this thrilling puzzle from our 2019 holiday quiz.

White to play and win:

That puzzle was tough, especially if you didn't catch the critical theme right away. But this next chess puzzle is not a chess puzzle at all.

Recently a video has been making the rounds in the gaming and math circles of the internet, and many who've watched it are shocked the puzzle is solvable with its stark and minimalist starting point.

It's a sudoku puzzle with some constraints based on chess rules.

If you're not familiar with sudoku, here are the rules:

To these standard conditions, the puzzle-maker Mitchell Lee has added two more restrictions that will make chess players feel right at home:

The expert solver is Simon Anthony, who quit his job at an investment bank to solve sudoku puzzles on YouTube.

He is initially flummoxed at the seeming inscrutability of the puzzle and believes he is being trolled by his YouTube partner. He even mentions stopping the video and calling his friend to berate him for the "impossible" challenge.

It's about this time we realize the old adage is true: There is nothing more exciting than watching a man solve a sudoku puzzle in real time.

The turning point could not have been scripted any better. The solver realizes the power of the chess-based rules and blurts out, "having said that," before getting started on the solution.

The rest of the video, which is absolutely worth watching for its full 25-minute runtime, becomes less about the mechanics of the puzzle and more about the solver's appreciation for the puzzle-maker's genius. The chess-based rules actually empower the solution to the minimalist starting puzzle.

The solver's YouTube channel, called "Cracking the Cryptic," has more of these sudoku puzzles with chess restrictions if you want to go down that rabbit hole. Here's another enjoyable real-time solving video of a chess-based sudoku.

If you'd rather stick to more traditional puzzles, many are available on Chess.com, including the quite addictive Puzzle Rush.

Give them a try, and let us know your favorite chess puzzles in the comments.

Read more here:
You Won't Believe This Chess-Themed Puzzle - Chess.com

Learning Chess The Easy Way

Unless youre a competitive chess player, you probably hold a number of misconceptions about the game.

You might think chess players are smart people, or that learning to play chess well is correlated with intelligence. You might think chess is hard, or that you hopelessly suck, and its an impossibly tall task to consistently beat that one friend or relative who is the reigning champ. You might think chess is boring, that its an activity youre not well suited for.

I used to think all of these things. I was wrong.

My dad taught me chess when I was five or six years old. He did it in the same boring way that most dads teach anything. First, he told me a bunch of stuff. We went through each piece and how it moves. He laboriously enumerated the rules of turn-taking and capturing and checkmate.

Next, we tried playing a game. This may have taken place many months later. I was probably too frustrated learning a million arbitrary piece movements to play a weird, annoyingly complicated board game with my father in the first sitting.

And of course, playing the game felt more like a chore than a reward. I would be absolutely clobbered on the board and frequently told I was explicitly wrong or implicitly stupid for missing obvious things. Ah, did you consider this move son? Or what happens if you try this instead? Many a dad just cant help himself in pointing out corrections a bit more frequently than others are comfortable with.

On rare occasions, I would be momentarily fooled by my dads goofy playacting. If he let me win or inconspicuously guided me to capture a piece, I felt accomplished. Id entertain brief hopes that there might be an easy road to better results. Maybe my feeble little braincouldwithstand the cold crushing complexity, the labyrinthine logic of chess. Such hopes would die as soon as I was reminded of our status roles as father and son, chess authority versus chess learner.

Finally, inevitably, I would leave the board feeling essentially humiliated. This feeling was often accompanied by a fit of childish rage, an I hate you, I hate chess monologue, and perhaps some pieces flying across the room. In hindsight, I could have skipped the chess entirely, reclaiming my precious youth instead by flinging things and smiling while gleefully shoutingwingardium leviosa!

Despite whatever tricks and treats my dad attempted to leverage for the sake of the well-intentioned chess interaction, it always felt mildly painful. And this dynamic continued foryears. I remained trapped in chess learning for normal people mode until I was twice my starting age. I guess there are far worse things out there, but still, it wasnt the bestit was the hard way.

Youve probably experienced this mode of learning in your life, whether its with a parent, teacher, student, friend, or romantic partner. The activity variescooking, painting, video games, cleaning, bird watching, golfbut the outcome rarely deviates. The teacher fails to inspire, and the student is left with a lingering sense of Id prefer if we didnt do that. Its simply not fun; its an unpleasant situation to be avoided or escaped.

I found my way out in middle school, when a group of friends started to play chess in the cafeteria during indoor recess on rainy days. We competed as peers, exploring the game together. There was a lot more pure joy, a lot more dynamism and engaged interaction, when we played. And we stumbled upon a real treasure in the team chess variant known as bughouse.

In bughouse, you pass captured pieces to your partner for them to place at leisure on their board. The game is fast-paced, exotic, and exciting when compared with normal chess. There are wild, surprising swings when a piece lands in the middle of the opponents army, as if it were an alien beamed down from outer space. Add to that the competitive aspect of middle schoolers rotating in and out on teams, king-of-the-hill style, and you can quickly see how this game was more addictive than many multiplayer video games.

MVL and Carlsen play some bughouse against Caruana and Aronian

The fun of bughouse led to my joining the chess club in high school. With a newly cemented foundation of enthusiasm, I learned to study chess in earnest and play in serious competitions. Notably, it was only after a couple years of devoted study and play that I first began to appreciate the life skills and metaphors that chess is so publicly symbolic of.

The importance of planning for the future, of evaluating options and making tough decisions, staying calm under pressure, and working hard to improve oneselfall these things do not come in a rush to the student of chess. In fact, they probably come much sooner to people learning virtually any other sport or activity!

With basketball, you learn to handle the ball, pass it around, and refine your aim towards the hoop. The mechanics can take a while, but you understand the contours of the journey fairly immediately with your body. So you enroll in the journey and learn from it within that framework. You can see how sports relate to life, teamwork, discipline, planning,et ceterafairly immediately after a couple practice sessions with a coach or training partner. Because youre not so hung up on the rules or environment.

Chess is different. You typically have to spend a ton of time learning the physics of chess first! It takes many weeks if not months for a dedicated student of the game to transition from novice to beginner level. In all my years playing chess with family as a kid, I never learned the core basic skills, let alone the full fancy rules ofen passantor castling. I would say I, like many others (and perhaps you) stayed a chess-exposed novice for a very long time without any significant progress or joy.

Reflecting on this journey, I now see how it could have been accelerated. I could have bypassed the initial years by jumping straight into the middle school peer experience of fun chess and bughouse. Then I could have moved more quickly to the high school challenge of getting intimate with the game.

Well have to save the full story of my chess career for another time, but I will mention one more interesting milestonewhen I became the father figure in high school, trying and failing to teach chess to my little sister! It was hard to convey why chess was interesting at all, and I now deeply regret crushing her without mercy through the years. I wish I had known then what I know now

So lets dive in (to this one weird secret trick that doctors hate):learning chess can be done quickly and transformatively through minigames! The starting place is Bishops + Rooks.

This is a minigame in which white moves a bishop first, then black moves a rook, and whoever captures a piece first wins. Its a draw with best play, but getting to that skill level may take a second grader a month of lessons. During this time, she will get a ton of instructive value from playing the minigame again and again.

I could say a lot more about Bishops + Rooks and how to best utilize this teaching tool. Feel free to check out my written guidehereand explainer videoshere! Theres a whole suite of such content, including follow-on minigames like knight battleship, pawn wars, zombie chess, and more. For the purposes of this essay, Ill give one additional example here then wrap up with some concluding takeaways.

This minigame teaches King Opposition, and its a good starting place for adults who are quick to master Bishops + Rooks. I dont recommend it for younger kids until they are enthusiastic tournament players, since the exercise can feel too abstract and tedious.

As with Bishops + Rooks, standard piece movement rules apply, but the objective isnt checkmate. Instead, white tries to get the king to a8, b8, or c8 while blacks goal is to block this from happening with her king. Theres a forced win for white that makes beautiful use of the real-game principle called distant opposition which I wont explain here but encourage you to exploreyou can find plenty of practice online.

Ive found playing this minigame with interested or even tentative friends to be extremely rewarding. Following up with king and pawn vs king scenarios then queen / rook checkmates usually leads to an enlightening aha experience. The most common reaction is, Ive never seen chess like this before.

Starting with a couple pieces instead of a complete set is crucial to teaching and learning chess the easy way. With these minigames, novices have a well-defined environment in which they quickly come to grapple with the fundamental skill of chess: finding options, thinking through them rigorously, and deciding on reasonable onesin a word, strategy.

The easy way isnt meant to imply that learning chess or strategic thinking is easy. Rather, minigames are more understandable bite-sized chunks to chew on and engage with, when compared with traditional rote verbal methods that try and fail to teach everything at once.

Another benefit is the level playing field minigames create. An advanced friend and her beginner friend can engage in a realm where both sides stand a chance at winning, or at least not losing horribly and ambiguously. The person with less chess experience feels comfortable making mistakes because its more obvious how they themselves can detect and learn from them. Thats empowering.

Lectures never have this tangible, experiential quality, which is why I believe its best to dive into silently playing minigames as soon as possible. The more rules there are to explain and memorize up-front, the more likely it is that folks end up in the sorry state of chess learning for normal people. Dont make people learn chess the hard way!

If youre in the teachers seat, with anybody but especially with young children, please bear in mind that they may be unfamiliar with the process of navigating on their own. Chess can be one of the first experiences in a persons life when they really get toseethe complete physics of a contained situation and to operate fully autonomously within such an environment.

Be extra patient, watch silently, and let them explore on their own as much as possible. Allow the outcome of the game to teach them their mistakes. You dont need to point out the correct answers. Give them a fun time and the opportunity to play again. Debrief with questions like what did you learn from playing today or notice that was interesting to you? Its really wonderful how many doors open with this kind of self-propelled learning journey and accompanying self-confidence gains.

The truth is that chess can and should be stimulating and fun and empowering, from the beginning. Its inherently interactive, and although its a zero-sum competition over the board, its more importantly a series of tractable challenges which provide a medium for self-improvement and social engagement.

In the era of COVID-19, humankind is riding the swelling wave of screens and isolation. Now more than ever, its especially important to have these kinds of healthy media of exchange and growth with our friends, families, and children.

Find a partner and try out a minigame! Everyone can experience and appreciate what it means when I (and others) think of chess fondly. Its all about having the right tools and mindset to get started on a rainy day in a fun, approachable way.

This article first appeared at https://andytrattner.com/chess-the-easy-way.html. Republished with kind permission.

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Learning Chess The Easy Way - Chessbase News