Ep. 132 (S8 Finale): Chess Teaching, Part 2: Materials, Resources, & Essential Concepts

The Chess Angle

This episode is our Season 8 Finale! Neal will be taking an extended end-of-year break and will return with Season 9 in January 2025. This week, we continue our discussion on chess teaching with a focus on materials, resources, and essential concepts for developing players.

Referenced Resources and Materials:

• Chess.com
• Chessable
• Practical Chess Exercises
• The Amateur's Mind
• Winning Chess Tactics
• Winning Chess Strategies
• Jeff Coakley books (red and green)
• Pandolfini's Endgame Course
• Openings: Starting Out series by Everyman Chess

Referenced Chess Concepts for Developing Players:

• General board vision and not hanging pieces
• Address gross blunders
• Basic mates with the heavy pieces (but arguably, don’t worry about mate with the Bishop and Knight)
• Basic mating patterns: back rank mate, Anastasia’s mate, Epaulette’s mate, Smothered mate, etc.
• Lots of mate-in-1 and mate-in-2 exercises
• Stalemate
• Basic tactical themes (pins, forks, skewers, overloaded piece, etc.)
• 3-move combinations
• Basic opening principles
• Basic middlegame & positional ideas (minor pieces, pawn structure, space, initiative, King safety, files and squares). Things like “rooks belong on open files,” “Knights prefer closed positions,” “Queen and Knight is a lethal attacking combination”
• Basic endgame ideas (King and pawn vs. King, the opposition, square of the pawn, triangulation, outflanking, rooks behind passed pawns, passed pawn tactics, rook and pawn endings, opposite colored bishop endings, Queen vs. pawn on the 7th, etc.

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