My 6 year old has gotten into chess in a very unexpected way. He was spending a week with his grandparents and I guess grandad got bored and decided to teach him chess and suddenly my kid wants to play chess all the time.
So I play him one day. Now, I'm not a good chess player, but I know all the rules, even the obscure ones, and I my attention span is a lot better than a 6 year old's. And he almost beat me.
We signed him up for chess classes with an instructor over Zoom. He's beating kids with a lot more experience than him. And I find myself trying to train to stay ahead of him. I sit in the room with him during his classes and pay attention, did all the lessons on chess.com and lichess.org, and am constantly doing puzzles on lichess (even using the training dashboard to focus on areas in having problems). I train probably 5x more than my son.
And he's still giving me a run for my money. I let him do chess puzzles with me and he frequently gets frustrated with how slow I am on some of the puzzles. He "sees" the 1-move and 2-move solutions almost immediately. The only place I have advantage is anything 3+ moves. If he doesn't see the move immediately, he doesn't know how to develop to a position that he can solve. I'm not much better, but I can occasionally get it, and that's the only way I'm staying ahead of him right now.
I'm similarly frustrated with the training on lichess. When I play games, I find I'm completely lost on the middle game. I play the openings that my kid's teacher has been drilling, then try to sit in a holding pattern of not making egregious mistakes until the other player makes a mistake I can recognize. I'm basically incapable of moving the game in a direction I want, and my simplistic play is easy pickings for a lot of people as they bait me into--in retrospect--rather basic traps.
I've just about resigned myself to living vicariously through my child on this issue. His classes being online, the instructor is often distracted with the other children being noisy to give real attention to training. My son recently moved up to a new class level (and he's now the youngest in the room!), so hopefully that will get better. I try to fill in that in-person coaching by just parroting what his teacher says and pointing out where my son isn't following along quite right.
Lichess tactics puzzles are literally what they say, tactics puzzles. You need to read a chess book. There are also lots of videos but I've never liked that medium. https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/wiki/books has lots of book recommendations.
There are also lots of coaches who will work with kids online or (pre-covid) in person, and lots of kids' chess events. I would stay away from in-person events for a while longer though, especially large ones, because of covid.
We live in a low-risk area, so we actually have him in a daycamp for chess this week while he has spring break from kindergarten. He's not the crazy stories of child prodigies you hear about, but it's really cool to see my little guy take an interest in something and actually grow in skill in it, rather rapidly.
I'll check out these books, but books are a pretty bad format for me. We actually have two kids, and I'm the lead of my project at work, so I don't have a lot of me time. Still, I'd really like to be the person he can count on to ask for help for at least a few more years.
Comments
My 6 year old has gotten into chess in a very unexpected way. He was spending a week with his grandparents and I guess grandad got bored and decided to teach him chess and suddenly my kid wants to play chess all the time.
So I play him one day. Now, I'm not a good chess player, but I know all the rules, even the obscure ones, and I my attention span is a lot better than a 6 year old's. And he almost beat me.
We signed him up for chess classes with an instructor over Zoom. He's beating kids with a lot more experience than him. And I find myself trying to train to stay ahead of him. I sit in the room with him during his classes and pay attention, did all the lessons on chess.com and lichess.org, and am constantly doing puzzles on lichess (even using the training dashboard to focus on areas in having problems). I train probably 5x more than my son.
And he's still giving me a run for my money. I let him do chess puzzles with me and he frequently gets frustrated with how slow I am on some of the puzzles. He "sees" the 1-move and 2-move solutions almost immediately. The only place I have advantage is anything 3+ moves. If he doesn't see the move immediately, he doesn't know how to develop to a position that he can solve. I'm not much better, but I can occasionally get it, and that's the only way I'm staying ahead of him right now.
I'm similarly frustrated with the training on lichess. When I play games, I find I'm completely lost on the middle game. I play the openings that my kid's teacher has been drilling, then try to sit in a holding pattern of not making egregious mistakes until the other player makes a mistake I can recognize. I'm basically incapable of moving the game in a direction I want, and my simplistic play is easy pickings for a lot of people as they bait me into--in retrospect--rather basic traps.
I've just about resigned myself to living vicariously through my child on this issue. His classes being online, the instructor is often distracted with the other children being noisy to give real attention to training. My son recently moved up to a new class level (and he's now the youngest in the room!), so hopefully that will get better. I try to fill in that in-person coaching by just parroting what his teacher says and pointing out where my son isn't following along quite right.
Lichess tactics puzzles are literally what they say, tactics puzzles. You need to read a chess book. There are also lots of videos but I've never liked that medium. https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/wiki/books has lots of book recommendations.
There are also lots of coaches who will work with kids online or (pre-covid) in person, and lots of kids' chess events. I would stay away from in-person events for a while longer though, especially large ones, because of covid.
We live in a low-risk area, so we actually have him in a daycamp for chess this week while he has spring break from kindergarten. He's not the crazy stories of child prodigies you hear about, but it's really cool to see my little guy take an interest in something and actually grow in skill in it, rather rapidly.
I'll check out these books, but books are a pretty bad format for me. We actually have two kids, and I'm the lead of my project at work, so I don't have a lot of me time. Still, I'd really like to be the person he can count on to ask for help for at least a few more years.