Saturday 5 June 2010

Fancy some homework?


Different coaches have different material and styles when working with students. I tend to use complete games as lessons, and my teaching style might best be described as "standing up and waving my arms around".
One approach I have seen work well from other coaches is a "Studies" based system. Using chess studies to get students to think harder about what moves to play, rather than just having them rely on memory and simple ideas, does lead to better results. The only drawback I see is that often studies are really, really hard (although I guess that is the whole point of them).
Here is a problem set as homework for a group of junior players here in Canberra, although they have been given 4 weeks to find the answer. It is a Helpmate in 2, which means that Black moves first, and helps White mate on his second move. So far I have got as far as assuming it relies on a double check from White, but I haven't been able to cut off all the escape squares for the Black king. Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree, and the answer lies in a different direction.

4 comments:

Unknown said...
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MachoM said...

You know it allready, Shaun, but you could also just use the importent parts of the games.

Btw. I'm tending to mix all three possibilies...

Jeremy said...

I think I finally solved it!

Anonymous said...

If I did this, I wonder whether I would benefit as much as doing a regular mate where black resists. Peter