Game of the Month -- Now embedded!

One of the "Games of the Month" at Knights of Concordia Chess Club (Whidbey Island, WA, USA)

The white player is an 8 year old boy.

The black player is a 7 year old boy.

Although errors and tactical oversights abound, both players show some good thinking skills beginning to develop.

Although the move ...Bf3+ looks like a blunder, it is amazingly hard to defend against. Capturing with either Rook or Pawn is still checkmate!

Game of the Month

Thanks to chessflash.com I finally have a simple way to post games for online viewing.

You will have to leave this blog to see it, but you can read the annotations in the move list and follow annotated alternative lines in the analysis.

Here is the first "Game of the month."

First meeting fun

It is clear that coaching a teaching are going to be high priorities at Knights. The group that assembled on Saturday included several children learning the basics-beyond-the-moves.

Talking over the possibilities, one good suggestion came out that I think we will follow. We will attempt to match together players of similar strength. In addition to starting players pooling their ignorance against one another, we will also have coached games, in which a coach would point out ways to think about a position, suggest candidate moves and encourage the player to think out loud. Of course such games are not competitive as such. Stronger players will simply have the opportunity to pit off against one another for fun.

We are not into timed games at this point. I tried one against Madge, but I think we both found the clock to be a distraction and annoyance.

One thing that is a definite success is recording games. I have entered two into PGN format so far, with two yet to go. I have done some basic analysis on these games and e-mailed them out. hopefully these will open the opportunity for improvement.

I intend to post the game of the month on this site. First I need to decide which is the game of the month.

Pass the word around, this group looks like it is going to be a lot of fun!

Teaching materials at Blog

visit Bishop's Game for materials for improving your chess game. I have set up this blog to be a central point for collecting useful articles and information, especially for people at my level of play (poor but having fun) and beginners.

Make sure to look at the side-bar for the headlines of recent posts, or click on the blog name at the top to go to the most recent post.

New Chess club at Concordia Lutheran Church, Oak Harbor WA

We at Concordia Lutheran are interested in starting a new chess club for North Whidbey Island.

I have been interested in playing tournament chess, however, I have been disappointed to see that the nearest tournaments are usually in Tacoma. It makes little sense to me to spend more time driving to and from the event than actually playing.

Concordia has already established itself as a game playing place with monthly game nights that have become very popular. It is quite appropriate that the game of kings would have its place here.

What exactly this club will look like will be determined by the participants. It could focus on casual play, blitz tournaments, skill building, or could even become a site for hosting official rated tournaments. It is possible that we could build a competitive team.

Because we have so many children and teens who are interested in learning more about chess and improving their game we will definitely have instruction time as a component.

Let me invite you,
our first meeting will be April 26, 2008 from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.