This is a beautiful Chess Puzzle of the day for Beginners and Parents who have learnt the piece movements in Chess. You may not know how to play chess like a Pro, but you will definitely be able to solve these puzzles. So no more excuses.
Open this page at your office* and ask your colleagues to solve this seemingly simple puzzle. Your friends will be stymied and who knows they may start getting a liking for chess!
Chess Puzzle of the day for Beginners and Parents – head banger!
Queen Mapping and Planning – mapping all pawn captures.
This puzzle involves the Queen. The Queen as you all know by now is able to move like a Rook and like a Bishop – that means along Ranks, Files and Diagonals.
Here the goal is to capture all the pawns in each move that the queen is undertaking.
The aim is to finish capturing all the pawns by the queen.
Spoiler: This one will be very addictive. Don’t tell me you were not warned – it is somewhat difficult if you are not focused!
The advantages of this solving these sort of mind bending puzzles are:
It helps students to plan better and logically.
improves their focus and nurtures their ability to understand theory.
Chess calls for several fairly complicated calculations over its 64-square board. This is a precursor to that.
It develops ‘reverse thinking’ abilities and visualizations, besides encouraging the students the importance of thinking ahead
Hi friends, lets look at some Tactics from the 41st Chess Olympiad.
Tactics from the 41st Chess Olympiad
This position comes from the game WGM Melanie Ohme of Germany (2301) vs WGM Olga Girya of Russia (2484), Round 4 of the 41st Chess Olympiad, played in Norway.
White to move.
The tactics puzzle is at move 37. White to move.
Black has just played 36. …Rh2. It appears as though Blacks pieces are all swarming over the white monarch and the attack by black might just come through. Right?
Look again. The Black King is also not a sleeping beauty rather looks like a sitting duck. The question is – how can White use that to his advantage?
The first thing to do is to lay the position on a real chess board.
Do not try solving it on the PC as you will be missing on the spatial aspects of chess training.
Moreover if the position is not solvable in the first two minutes then stop staring at the screen.
Sit down and start solving on a chess board.
But don’t feel any necessity to do it that way; just try to “see” as far as you can with the diagram, and if you can’t keep the position or visualize deep enough, then its time to set up a board.
This wayit will improve your vision on a real board also since real chess games are OTB.
If you can mate him, it will be good. If you cannot, try tactical methods to snare some free stuff!
Oops – looks like I just blurted out the answer.
Don’t scroll down any further as the answer will be posted in the following lines.
Let us see what the answer is: Bb6+ followed by RxN. (The Knight is defending the Rook on d2. So you get the picture now?). Black loses a lot of material and resigned.
At the age where kids grapple with numbers and alphabets, this three-year-old Sparsh Bisht is mastering the moves over the chess board. Still in his pre-nursery (pre-KG), Sparsh took to the game four months back and has started to achieve success against players double his age. Playing his first tournament, Sparsh won three matches in seven rounds and was placed 37th out of 62 participants. At 4 years – youngest Indian chess player or maybe in the World, deserves a standing ovation.
He was the youngest participant in the U-9 category. He was the recipient of trophy for the youngest participant. A resident of Gurgoan, Sparsh’s parents want to see him as the world’s youngest rated chess players. His father R S Bisht is Sr. Asstt. Engineer in HR-Admin Dept, Powergrid Corporation of India Ltd, Gurgaon.
This dream achievement was possible by the dedicated efforts of his parents. Born in May 2009, Sparsh is the youngest chess player in Gurgaon, who has already participated in National level tournaments, State and District championships. “He started playing in the year 2012 in November, when he was three years and ten months old,” said Sparsh’s mother, Preeti Bisht.
Chess talent, like a mathematical or musical ability, shows up early on life, and once identified has to be carefully cultivated. Call it Karma or genes or mere chance of nature, it was a case of catching them young! In Sparsh’s case, it was his father Rajendra Bisht, an engineer in Gurgaon, who became his first inspiration as an early chess pal. “I was down with knee injury and was spending a lot of time playing chess on the laptop. And I could see that the game interested Sparsh a lot.” Bisht said.
Here is a video of the young star in action:
I wish him all the very best in his chess and real world endeavors. He is our inspiration. He may be a toddler but his sights are far higher than adults!
Kindly share this as much as you can. He deserves our adoration.
Golden Chess Centre conducts regular training sessions for upcoming chess players in Nanganallur, Madipakkam, Adambakkam, Moovarasampet, Kilkattalai, Kovilambakkam, Puzhuthivakkam, Ullagaram and Pazhavanthangal – Chennai, as well as online sessions for those players who live out of Chennai.
In case you are wondering what excuse you need to give for losing your chess game here are a few tips and ready made excuses that you can use for pacifying yourself or others. The Top 10 reasons for losing at chess – choose wisely!
No one likes to lose at chess, but if you’re about to lose you might as well give a convincing reason. Most beginners and laymen assume that chess is a game of brains and that the brainier player will always wins.
However professional chess players know that being dominated by the opponent is just one way of losing and that there are other, more ‘plausible’ ways.
Here are a few of funky favorites, many of which we can still use and are relevant even today!
Top 10 reasons for losing at chess
1. Dog ate my score sheet;
2. Dead batteries in hidden transmitter; could not cheat.
3. Went outside for fresh air, forgot about the tournament;
4. Disturbed by own reflection in opponent’s sunglasses.
5. Still depressed over 1964 death of Fred Reinfeld;
6. Inexplicably confused ECO A30 line 14 footnote 8c with ECO A18 line footnote 7c; lost queen;
7. Unluckily paired with arch-nemesis going by the somewhat mundane name – G. Kasparov;
8. During game, pondered both sides of IPL controversy; lost on time;
9. Studied book ‘How to Beat your Dad at Chess’, was unprepared for other opponents;
10. After making move, accidentally punched opponent instead of clock.
Addendum:
11. Did not like my opponent’s face.
12. Opponent’s dress code was disturbing to say the least.
13. Slept off on the chess board as I was awake till late last night preparing for this game.
Let me know if you have any other excuses. We need to share them!
Here are some videos in the same vein. Hope you enjoy them.
And the best one till date: Remember to learn how to capture two knights with one move!!!
Chess is a very interesting game in that it is fully concrete. Therefore, chess has given a number of interesting experiences to the world. Here are Some really interesting facts about Chess
Some really interesting facts about Chess (that even I did not know!)
1. Did you know the number of possible ways of playing the first four moves for both sides in a game of chess is 319,999,664,000?
2. The longest game of chess that is theoretically possible is 5,989 moves.
3. The first chessboard with alternating light and dark squares (as it appears today) was made in Europe in 1090 AD.
4. According to the America’s Foundation for Chess, there are 169,518,829,100,545,000,000,000,000,000 (approximately 1.71×1029) ways to play the first 10 moves of a game of chess. Even a computer would find that difficult to digest.
5. The word “checkmate” in chess originally comes from the Persian word “Shah Mat,” which is often translated to “the king is dead”, although more accurate may be “the king is trapped” or ” the king is without escape” (Treadwell).
6. The longest chess game ever played was I.Nikolic – Arsovic, Belgrade 1989, which ended in – hold your breath – 269 moves. The game ended in a draw!
7. There are 400 different possible positions after one move each. There are 72,084 different possible positions after two moves each. There are over 9 million different possible positions after three moves each. There are over 318 billion different possible positions after four moves each. The number of distinct 40-move games in chess is far greater than the number of electrons in the observable universe. The number of electrons is approximately 1079, while the number of unique chess games is 10120.
8. The second book ever printed in the English language was about chess! Now that is really strange.
9. The new pawn move, where pawns were allowed to advance two squares on its first move instead of one, was first introduced in Spain in 1280.
10. The first chess game played between space and earth was on June 9, 1970 by the Soyez-9 crew. The game ended in a draw.
11. An old puzzle: If you put one grain of wheat on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth, and so on, how many grains of wheat do you need to put on the 64th square? The answer is 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 (approximately 9.22×1018) grains of wheat. That’s a lot of nutrition.
12. The folding chessboard was invented by a priest who was forbidden to play chess. The priest found a way around it by making a folding chessboard. When folded together and put on a bookshelf, it simply looks like two books.
13. Kirk and Spock have played chess three times on the show Star Trek. Kirk won all three games.
14. A computer called Deep Thought became the first computer to beat an international grandmaster in November 1988, Long Beach, California.
15. Garry Kasparov, at 22, became the youngest ever world champion. Ruslan Ponomariov was younger but he was not the undisputed world champion; Maia Chiburdanidze was even younger when she won the women’s title.
16. Some people are so good at chess, they can play against more than one opponent at a given time. In 1922, World Champion José Raúl Capablanca played 103 opponents simultaneously and won 102 of the games (with 1 draw). This type of chess prowess display is called as a ‘SIMUL’.
