Hello all,

I may return to chess coaching in the near future.

Meanwhile, the Bartlesville Chess Club has a new location

First United Methodist Church
4715 Price Road
Bartlesville, OK 74006     (About 1/2 mile east of the Mall on Price Road)

We meet from 6:45 PM to 9:00 PM. Players of all strengths and ages are welcome.

Bartlesville Chess Club

I haven't posted on this blog lately, because I haven't been coaching. The sponsor at Kane School was transferred to another school. My sponsor is still enthusiastic about chess, but that school hasn't approved a chess club yet.

So I've been doing some self-coaching - working on my game, improving my tactical ability. The turnout at the Bartlesville Chess Club has been good lately. Often eight or ten players each week.

But things are looking up. A new store in town, Gamers Guild, encourages gamers of all sorts, including chess players, to use the tables in the back of the store to play games on. So on Tuesday afternoon, I get together with some of my former students for games and instruction. I still don't have a chess team, but at least these kids are still playing chess.

And Wednesday, I will be doing a Chess Workshop at the Gamers Guild to teach adults how to play.

So things are looking up a bit.

I have been busy teaching chess at Chess Adventure. This year we had 112 students, another record attendance. My class consisted of 14 students, ages 8 – 10 years old and rated under 300. Actually, only four of my students had an established rating with the top student rated at 208.


The class was well behaved and motivated. I hope I had something to do with it - I tried to keep it snappy and within their attention span. 

Each day would start with a team event, then into my classroom for a short lecture followed by hands on learning. After a snack break, the students would play in an in-class chess tournament.


The students really enjoyed the class tournament. I ran it as a four round Swiss system, using the student ages as a very rough way to assign games for the first round. One of our boys, John won this tournament, but overall, the five girls in my class outplayed the boys.


After our daily tournament game, we all would return to the common room for a group activity. I’ll talk about this some more later. 


Friday was a team tournament. Two girls from the Kane Elementary chess club were on a team that won second place. 


But for me, the highlight of the week was one of my students figuring out a difficult mate in the third round of the team tournament. 

Beginning students often cannot force a checkmate even when they have overwhelming advantage. So I set up the following positions for my class and taught them the basic checkmates:

• White’s two rooks vs. black’s lone king.
• White’s king and queen vs. black’s lone king.

I showed them how to work the mates and couple of times, and then let them practice against each other, helping out those that didn’t quite get it. Students worked through the positions at least four times. 

What about a king and ROOK vs. king?  I simply had no time. The best I could do was tell them to use the same idea they learned in the king and queen vs. king. 

Mataya, one of my 8-year-old students, found herself with the advantage of her king and a rook against the opponent’s lone king. After a lot of maneuvering, she figured out how to do it! She had a strong opponent and she remembered my (very minimal) instructions and worked out the rest for herself over the board. Impressive!  

For many students, human chess was the most memorable part of Chess Adventure. Who wouldn’t want to be a queen or knight on a big chessboard. Thirty-two students wore a t-shirt with a chess piece printed on the front and back. The younger kids were (rather wiggly) pawns and the older ones were selected for kings and queens. Then they stood on a large floor chessboard, and made the moves while teams of advanced students played the game and called out the moves. 


Lots of fun, lots of chess. That’s Chess Adventure! 

It is so easy to post to Facebook or Google+, but blogging takes a bit more thought. But that is the strength of blogging - it forces one to think. So with that introduction, I intend to get out of my blogging slump.

I love scholastic chess and have been involved for about three years. School is out, but I am teaching kids via three avenues.

1) The Mutual Girls club asked me (and another) to teach the girls to play chess. Chess has been viewed as a man's game for way too long. I hope to change that just a little. Girls have an equal capacity to play chess.

2) I am tutoring elementary school children, mostly from Kane Elementary School, but others as well. Last week six children showed up.

3) I will be a chess teacher at the Chess Adventure Chess camp in Owasso. I did this last year and enjoyed it so much. And they want me to do it again. Anyone interested in Chess Adventure, should look at the web site http://chessadventure.org -  five days of intensive chess!

And as always, the Bartlesville chess club meets on Thursday evenings - 6:30 PM at Tri County Technology Center on Nowata Road.

Chess is going well at Kane Elementary School in Bartlesville.  Our Tuesday meeting was a good one with 16 students playing.  The attendendance has picked up since the OSCO scholastic tournament in Claremore, OK. This was the first tournament we have attended this year and we did well - out of seven kids, four of them won medallions for winning three or more games out of five. One of our students had four wins and a draw.  The team brought home a third place trophy.  A very good day.

Our Thursday chess tutoring has also been going well. We have fewer students for this, but the kids are learning a lot of tactics.  As a reward for playing well in the tournament we are going to be playing bughouse chess today.  If you don't know, bughouse chess is a form of team chess. It is very popular among children and leads to quite wild positions.  I can't say that bughouse helps kids play better at regular chess, but they like it and it keeps them interested in chess.

Several of our students have also been playing adults (and each other) at the Bartlesville Chess Club on Thursday evenings at Tri County Tech. I hope they keep it up. They almost always loose, but playing stronger players is a fast way to improve.

The Bartlesville Chess club always has an open invitation for anyone interested in the game. Thursday evenings at Tri County Tech on Nowata road from 6:30 to 9:00 PM. 

promoting girls chess

Susan Polgar Chess Daily News and Information: Chess' greatest challenge: girls

Chess Adventure was a success

Chess Adventure concluded Friday (July 15). It was a great week for the kids and for me personally. We had 99 students of all ages at the camp for a week of chess instruction and play. Most of the students participated in an in-class tournament, as well as Friday’s team tournament.

I was given one of the larger classes, 13 students, but on the second day two students moved from a lower class to mine. Thanks to volunteer parent help and reasonable behavior from the kids, this was a manageable class size.

The campers were divided into groups according to rating and age.  My class was 8 and 9 year old students that had no scholastic or USCF rating. In other words, they had not played in a tournament yet. So my goal was to fix the common weaknesses in their play and to prepare them for tournament play.

My goals were:

• Review the rules of chess – how the pieces move, checkmate, stalemate and the special moves of en passant, pawn promotion and castling
• Proper attitudes and behaviors
• Tournament rules – with a strong focus on playing quietly and the touch move rule
• Kids this age give away pawns and pieces all the time – actually seeing possible captures is a huge skill. Throughout the week I constantly focused on “finding free stuff”
• The value of pieces – kids this age are constantly giving away higher value pieces for lower value ones – So we also focused this week on “looking for bargains”
• We covered the basic tactical ideas, pins, forks, skewers, etc. but due to time constraints we only touched the surface.
• We also scratched the surface of proper opening principles.
• And finally, we played a five round Swiss tournament in the class.

That was quite a lot to cover in 4 days, but the children took it in stride. For illustrations, I showed them some of my games when I was a scholastic player, and they really enjoyed it.

I had hoped to teach them chess notation, but ran out of time. As a compromise, I always called out my moves on the demo board (“What happens if the bishop moves to b4 Bishop to b4”) and I expected them to answer in chess notation(“black moves his Queen to c4, check”). So they have some introduction to chess notation.

The children were in my class four days from about 1:30 to 4:00 PM (including break time). At 4:00 PM the students divided into their teams for some sort of quite noisy team activity. After sitting quietly in class for several hours, they seemed to enjoy it immensely.

The final day was a team tournament, which went over very well. One of the children from Kane School was on a first place team!

Well, that’s my thoughts about Chess Adventure – a great place to be on a hot summer week.