Chess Lecture Thursday at TMCC

IM Angelo Young is holding chess lectures more regularly at his Touch Move Chess Center. Here's the latest:

WHAT: Chess Lecture

WHEN: January 8,2009 (every Thursday 7pm -8:30pm)

TOPIC: Opening theory + sample game+ Q & A

WHERE: Touch Move Chess Center / 5639 N. Ashland ave. Chicago IL. 60660

PHONE: 773-627-2759

FORMAT: 1:30 hrs

Limit to the first 30 participant

Fee: $10 / $5 TMCC Members.

OPEN TO ALL !

Lecturer : IM Angelo Young

7th x Illinois State Champion

FREE SNACKS & DRINKS !

Please be there on time.

The Basics for Tournament Players

This Saturday, the Youth Chess Foundation of Chicago will hold a scholastic chess tournament at Bell Elementary School, where they will introduce a new competition section for “novices,” kids who are playing in their very first tournament. The idea is to get novices playing other novices and avoid having some 8th-grade “Beginner” who’s played in ten tournaments but not yet advanced to Intermediate crush some kindergartener like an aluminum can and scare the latter away from chess competition forever.

Okay, so maybe the imagery is a bit over the top, but you get the idea. I think it’s a good one.

At least three Ray kids plan to play in the Novice section, and for them, as well as anyone else who needs a refresher on the basics for tournament play, we offer these aides for brushing up. The things your child should be prepared with are:

• Scholar’s Mate. Know how to use it and how to avoid having it used on you. Go here and here for the details.
• Basic Checkmates. The two main ones are rook & king vs. king and queen & king vs. king. These are basic techniques that are used to finish the kind of endgames that frequently come up. Once your child masters the techniques, winning these games is second nature.
• Opening Guidelines. Go here for the most common openings.
• Review GM Arthur Bisguier’s Ten Tips for Winning Chess.

Review these as well as you can with your kids before Saturday, and they should be ready. Now, as Bruce Pandolfini would say, go out there and be brilliant.

Two Knights Defense

The Two Knights Defense is one of the most popular and playable openings for scholastic players, and here Igor and Gleb give you a nice primer on it. What I like about this video is that the guys don't encourage you to memorize lines; they show you the ideas, how each line works, and where some of the traps and blunders lie. Watch as many times as you like to learn the basics, then move on to books and other sources to learn the opening more deeply. For example, the variation where White sacrifices his knight to bring the Black king out into the open where it is then attacked by the White queen is called the Fried Liver Attack, and it gets very complicated and interesting after the last move shown here, where the White queen forks the Black king and knight.

Click twice on the screen to watch the video.

Now He Tells Me

Michael Goeller is a chess blogger par excellence; it’s hard to think of anyone who plies the craft with more finesse and sophistication. While the rest of us fill our columns with the usual fluff— gossip, cross tables, the odd grip-and-grin photo, and our failures to scale Mt. De la Maza,—Michael’s blog the Kenilworthian is full of real chess, analyses and annotations of important games, openings, variations, novelties and so on. I picture him laboring for hours and even days over pithy posts like “Urusov Analysis - 3...Nxe4 4.dxe5 Qh4,” and “Refuting 5...Nxe4 in the Scotch Four Knights.”

Michael’s latest contribution to high-end content aggregation is a collection of sources and links on the Traxler/Wilkes Barre counter attack, some of which he gets from Dennis Monokroussos.

It’s great stuff; I only wish he’d published it before FM Aleksandar Stamnov sprang the Traxler on me in this game at the North Avenue Chess Pavilion earlier in the summer:



Yes, I know: serves me right for playing the Fried Liver Attack against a master. Notice that every move White (moi) made beginning with 7. Ke2 was not only wrong but probably the worst one possible in each position. Anyone can blunder, even Kramnik, but to do so repeatedly and spectacularly takes a special gift, you must admit.

Thanks, Professor Goeller. I will attend to the lesson promptly.