Chess Teaching Archives

The evergreen game

The evergreen game is (like the immortal game) another famous chess game from Adolf Anderssen. The game was played against Jean Dufresne in 1852 and can also be found in the ICOFY database that we have used during one of our previous lessons. The name evergreen means something like “Forever Young”.
The whole game can [...]

Finding combinations

Let’s have a look at the next diagram taken from a real game played in 2007. It is White’s turn to move.

Before reading further try to figure this out by yourself.

Smothering the King

In addition to the smothered mate, in which the mated king is unable to move because all the surrounding squares are occupied by his own pieces, there are a lot of mating patterns in which the king is only partly smothered by his own pieces.
Let’s have a look at the next diagram and try to [...]

Chess exercises

I am looking for a suitable way to publish more chess exercises on this chess site. I prefer to use a larger chess board and to be able to ask more than one move before revealing the solution.
At DHTML Goodies I have found a chess widget that can be used to display pgn files, broadcast [...]

The Elephant Trap

The Elephant Trap is a famous trap in the Queen’s Gambit Declined. I am not sure why it is called the Elephant Trap, but the name reminds me to an oil painting of Eddie William Powell. The picture above shows a part of this painting. More information about this and other paintings of this artist [...]