Chess for kids

A few days ago I wanted to take a closer look at some of Richard Reti’s endgame studies (two examples here), and one of the google links lead me to this site, chesskids.com.

I started playing chess relatively late, ten-fifteen years ago chess simply wasn’t a sport for children. No, of course it still isn’t, but there’s no way around the fact that it’s much better now than it used to be. If I had known about resources like this one and they had been available at the time, in Danish, I would probably have started playing much sooner – the site seems to contain a solid introduction to most of the basic concepts you need to know about when starting out, and the many questions and quizzes in the classes secure that no ‘passive learning’ is possible. As for myself, I lent a book or two on opening theory in the 8th or 9th grade but found them much too specific and focused on lines, and they basically just didn’t tell me what I wanted to know, so I eventually gave the game a good long rest for a few years before I took it up again. It’s no fun being able to play the Chigorin variation of the Ruy Lopez and follow the theory up to move 12-13 by memory, if your opponent chooses to play the Sicilian. If I had found a site like the one above instead, things might very well have been different.

I don’t know of any Danish resources like this one, and I’d be happy to hear about it if one of my Danish readers does. I am aware that the Danish Chess Federation (DSU) introduced a new web resource, ‘skaktaktik‘, some time ago, which is a collection of positions and puzzles aimed at increasing tactical awareness, but the primary target of this resource is not children and beginners (even if they might also benefit from it, as a supplement to some other introductionary material), and that resource is not available for free like chesskids, as it requires membership of DSU to utilize.

One more thing. Tyler Cowen recently made me think about how much time went into my hobbies. It wasn’t what the post was about, but it was still one of the first thoughts that came to mind after I’d read the post. I figured a lot of it was just the time other people spend in front of the tv. As for chess, I have a pretty good idea how much time I’ve spent. On my playchess account, I have played roughly 500 rated blitzgames and 1500 rated bullet games over the last year, corresponding to something like 25-30 minutes/day. The calculation looks like this: An average blitzgame takes 6 minutes. Most blitzgames are 3+0 meaning an average length not above 5 minutes, but I also play an occasional 5+0 or 10+0, at least enough to push up the average somewhat. An average bullet game takes close to 3 minutes as I play roughly the same amount of 1+0 and 2+0 games and they rarely end before one player run out of time. I also play unrated games and a few slow games sometimes, these games account for the marginal five minutes from 25 to 30.