[PAST EVENT] Chess Lesson and Free Play

Today we covered checkmates in 2 moves. A key thing to note in some of the positions we covered today was that there were two options in some of the puzzles- either to capture your opponent’s hanging piece or checkmate and finish the game! Always look for forcing moves and don’t discard a move unless you look at the entire line. One of our puzzles involved sacrificing a rook by giving a checking, thus vacating the square for the queen and pawn to deliver checkmate!

We then had free play with clocks and it was exciting and fun to watch some of the games unfold. We saw early castling, and good development of pieces early on which are important fundamentals of the game. We did see an almost win game that ended up in stalemate. Always watch for stalemates especially when there is only a king left on the board . In such cases, make sure that if you are not giving your opponent a check, then the opponent’s king has space to move.

As always, thank you to the parents for supporting your child in their chess journey