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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.

Read more:
Learning Chess The Easy Way - Chessbase News

When Viswanathan Anand left Chennai for Frankfurt in February, the city was waiting to see M.S. Dhoni back at Chepauk. The Southern metropolis was also talking about the latest Rajinikanth film, Darbar. All those classical music and dance stages were still alive, though the season had ended.

It was an entirely different Chennai that he returned to, some three months later. The IPL had been postponed indefinitely, cinemas had been closed, dancers and musicians didnt know when they would be able to get back on stage.

The novel coronavirus has changed the world, almost unrecognisably.

Anand is relieved and happy that he can finally be home again; that he can spend time with his wife Aruna and son Akhil, after being quarantined in Bengaluru on his arrival from Germany. He is also glad that he can play chess from his comfortable, familiar workstation at his home in Kotturpuram.

Yes, the five-time World champion wants to play in a tournament again, but he doesnt know when he can do it. I dont know when chess will return to where it was before, he tells The Hindu over the phone. It seems some countries are coming out [of the lockdown], but they are not completely out of danger, while others are still in an earlier stage.

He adds: Only when the vaccine comes, can we breathe easy. A part of me hopes that by August or September we will at least be used to this and no doubt there will be a lot of precautions still. It could well be next year; I am getting used to that reality.

He is also getting used to playing competitive chess online. He had done quite a bit of that while he was stranded in Frankfurt.

And he played some splendid chess, belying his 50 years consider his 17-move demolition of World No. 4 Ian Nepomniachtchi at the Nations Cup.

I was very happy with the win against Nepo, he says. The funny thing is when I was preparing this line in the morning, this particular variation came up and I thought I should familiarise myself with it. I also liked the way I played against Teimour Radjabov, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Ding Liren.

He is not surprised that online chess really took off during the lockdown. It has been around for many, many years, like video calls or working from home, he says. We didnt imagine we would be doing those things so often. I hope those people who are introduced to chess online will stay with it.

Anand thinks the Novak Djokovic episode is a warning for everyone. I heard that Serbia was doing well and that enough people had felt the risk had receded, he says. But then you see that what happened with the Adria Tour.

The World No. 1 organised the tennis tour, but before long tested positive for the coronavirus, along with three other players.

We should never take the virus lightly. says Anand. It is like playing chess against the computer. You cant completely understand the thing. All you could is to do, sit and focus on what you are supposed to do right, make your moves and hang in there.

Even if you are doing things right, you dont get points for that, all you get is that you are not infected today, but you have to take all the precautions tomorrow. So this new world of distancing and these new habits we picked up might last longer than we think.

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Dont know when chess will return to where it was, says Viswanathan Anand - The Hindu

During a brainstorming discussion with a colleague on the value of entropy in machine learning models, specifically the models used in threat intelligence work, I mentioned that many of the threat intelligence models in use today seem to overemphasize the pattern recognition aspect of threat intelligence through the egregious use of algorithms. By contrast, they seem to underemphasize the novelty of suchaspects as intuition and chaos, both of which would be present if two malicious actors were pitted against a defensive system that is nothing more than an artificially intelligent system with lots of machine learning algorithms. Then I thought about the game of chess, which cognitive psychologists have studied with great interest for more than 70 years. I did a bit of my own research to see what aspects of chess psychologists found most intriguing, and whetherany of their findings could be used to build better threat intelligence programs.

The 1965 book Thought and Choice in Chess,by Adriaan D de. Groot, seems to have laid the foundation for the study of psychology in chess. There are several other psychologists who studied the game and its players; William Chase, Herbert Simon and Dr. Ferdinand Gobet are worth mentioning. The short synopsis of their combined research on the best chess players is as follows:

There are many more findings published on the cognitive aspects of chess, but this short list led to something researchers today callChunk Hierarchy and REtrival STructures(CHREST). CHREST,in turn, led to the design of computational models that could help psychologists understand why chess experts are so good at the game, by studying the number of moves the typical chess expert memorizes and how an expertorganizes information mentally while playing. The research into CHREST, in turn, led to the development of mathematical models for hierarchical chunking in the brain to help cognitive scientists understand how the brain ingests, organizes, stores and later retrieves information.

So what does all this research on the game of chess have to do with threat intelligence? A great deal. CHREST and the subsequent mathematical models for hierarchy and retrieval structures underpin the databases, algorithms and artificially intelligent software used for threat hunting and by the threat intelligence correlation engines today (as well as other types of technology).

Threat hunters today are much likeplayers in a game of chess where the adversary maneuvers in much the same ways as an opponent across a grand chess board. A good threat hunter can determine just who that opponent is, based on the moveshe or she makes. We consider adversarial activity as tactics, techniques and procedures just as we consider a chess opponents moves as rooted in strategy where the decisions made are based upon patterns and models. One could easily consider the science of threat intelligence as the identification of these patterns as quickly as possible to predict future action and to engage appropriate response maneuvers. However, where does the science of threat intelligence intersect the art of intuitive prediction based on skilland experience? How can an analyst derive meaning and predictive value in a seemingly chaotic engagement?

Interestingly, one of the experiments with the CHREST model showed that expert chess players havesuperior memory recall for chess positions that are considered random by weaker players. Why is this important? Because it shows that expert players are not only playing the game based upon the patterns they know or the visual representation they have of the chess board in their minds, they are also playing by intuition or gut-feeling something no mathematical model, machine learning algorithm or artificially intelligent system can duplicate today.

By allowing a team of analysts to rely on their expertise with the introduction of chaos and entropy, we can glean the actions and strategic moves that wed the science of threats with the art of analysis. Then we can truly provide a robust threat intelligence gathering effort that provides threat actor identification, activity prediction, mitigation and response strategies.

To harness the threat intelligence power enabled by chaos and entropy, we can take the followinglessons from the game of chess:

All of this analysis sounds glorious for large firms with lots of available capital. For small businesses with limited access to both financial and human capital, building a sophisticated threat intelligence team is extremely difficult to achieve.Small businesses:

What could a small business or firm do with a limited budget and no sophisticated COTS solution? Itcan hire entry-level cyber security professionals who have a love for the game of chess, because those individuals will bring with them the following capabilities:

Skills such as those needed to findOWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities within an application stack can be taught through suchsites as HackerOne. The best hackers we have ever met had something in common with the best chess players we know a love for the game.

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Management and Strategy Consultant, IBM

Kelly is a management and strategy consultant with over 20 years of consulting experience ranging from security analysis, to functional analysis to security ... read more

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A Grand Game of Chess: Entropy and Patterns in Threat Intelligence Models - Security Intelligence

Herbert B. Jacklyn, Courtesy of Family

US Chess recently received a bequest to support the continued development of chess players between the age of 18 and 21. The endowed fund will be known as the Herbert B. Jacklyn Fund.

According to his family, Mr. Jacklyn wanted young chess players to continue enjoying and competing in chess as they entered adulthood. It was a game he loved his entire life and he didn't want people to lose interest or stop playing as they moved on in life.

Herbert Jacklyn was born on December 18, 1924.He grew up in The Bronx and graduated from Columbia University Dental School. He served as an army medic in World War II, where he was stationed in Okinawa and was awarded a purple heart during his service.

He always loved chess and during the 1960s and 1970s he was very active in the local chess clubs and in US Chess. While he made it to a Class A ranking, he also instilled a love of chess in his two sons. Daniel Jacklyn reached Expertand Paul Jacklyn reached Master.

His love for chess continued well into his nineties. Even then, while living in Florida, he was involved in organizing chess tournaments for children in local elementary schools, who all looked up to him and referred to him as the "Chess Master."Mr. Jacklyn passed away on March 8, 2020 at the age of 95.

US Chess will develop guidelines for the Jacklyn Fund program, funded through income generated by the Jacklyn Fund.

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The Herbert B. Jacklyn Fund to Support Players Between Ages 18 and 21 - uschess.org

As chess has surged in popularity on Twitch, so have some of the timeless game's more charismatic professional players, like sisters Alexandra and Andrea Botez.

Chess has existed in some form since the 6th century, with the standardization of its pieces coming in the 15th century and its rules in the 19th century. But the ancient game hadnt fared well competing for views on Twitch until March 2020, when growth became substantial before turning exponential in May. The Botez sisters have been key to its surge.

Alexandra and Andrea are funny, engaging, and absolute savages on the chess board. While the chess community has been lambasted as elitist for gate-keeping against casuals, the Botez sisters feel like real people who just want to help the community grow (and maybe roast people, or themselves, along the way).

Alexandra, the older of the two, is just 24 years old but already an established force within the chess community, boasting the Woman FIDE Master title and numerous championships dating back to her time with the National Canadian Team as a 15-year-old.

Andrea, conversely, is just out of high school and devoid of international chess recognition despite being a talented player herself, with national competitions and some prize money under her belt. Together, theyre talented enough to help tutor celebrities like Hafthor the Mountain Bjornsson, but also humble enough to engage with their communities outside of the chess board.

That dynamic exemplifies the meteoric rise of chess on Twitch. The intrinsic qualities of chess, with its high skill-ceiling and steep learning curve, are not foreign to Twitch users. However, the game has lacked the interest of popular streamers and community engagement from skilled players. That changed in May 2020 when Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura decided to take the infamous Felix xQc Lengyel under his wing.

Often working alongside Nakamura, whether by providing tutelage, competing, or simply commentating in a burgeoning online chess scene, the Botez sisters have carved out a tremendous niche. Their channel has since gone from about 73,000 followers in May to near 250,000.

With Twitch popularity dictated by both in-game talent and the ability to foster community, Alexandra and Andreas ability to mesh technical superiority with community engagement is unparalleled in chess. While Hikaru can be hilarious himself (especially when hes dryly poking fun at players), the Botez sisters are entrenched in the platforms culture and are avid propagators of the memes and conversations that help develop a fanbase with a foundation not solely built on raw chess skill.

Whether its dissecting chess matches, trying out games like Griftlands, or simply talking with (or roasting) their peers and fans on Just Chatting, the Botez sisters prove how much stronger your community can become when top players dont take themselves too seriously.

Original post:
Who are Alexandra and Andrea Botez? The chess queens of Twitch - Dexerto