Chess Teaching

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 live games or display training exercises.
I think it looks rather nice, but before I start adding a lot of exercises I want to evaluate it more thoroughly. For this evaluation I have used the 1001 Brilliant Ways to Checkmate which can be found at a lot of other locations on the internet and are also included with the widget.

What do you think?
Should I add the new exercises and make them available in a similar way or should I stick to the WordPress plugin I have used before?

Tags: Chess, Exercises.
Categories: Chess lessons // 1 Comment »

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 can be found at this website.
But OK, let’s continue with the trap.

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Tags: Chess, Opening.
Categories: Chess lessons, Intermediate 2 // 1 Comment »

The immortal game is one of the most famous games ever played. It was played in 1851 as an informal game between Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky. According to Wikipedia:

Played between the two great players at the Simpson’s-in-the-Strand Divan in London, the immortal game was an informal one played during a break in a formal tournament. Kieseritzky was very impressed when the game was over, and telegraphed the moves of the game to his Parisian chess club. The French chess magazine La Régence published the game in July 1851. This game was later nicknamed “The Immortal Game” in 1855 by the Austrian Ernst Falkbeer.

As you can see in the figure above the game is so famous that the position after the 20th move is used as an illustration on this 1984 stamp from Suriname.

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Tags: Chess.
Categories: Chess lessons, Intermediate 3 // 2 Comments »

The Budapest Defence is a chess opening that starts with the moves 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e5. This is one of the rare gambit lines for Black, because almost all of the gambit lines are for White. It is rarely played at grandmaster level, but for the amateur it may be a nice way to immediately attack White’s centre. During most games the sacrificed pawn will be given back, because the alternatives are giving Black a nice advantage in the development of his pieces.
In this lesson we will focus on showing the Kieninger trap, which is one of the reasons to play the Budapest gambit at all. In addition the most important variations of the Budapest gambit are shown.

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Tags: Chess, Opening.
Categories: Chess lessons, Intermediate 3 // Add Comment »

A passed pawn is a pawn that can not be stopped anymore by one of the opposing pawns. A passed pawn is rather valuable especially in the endgame. Passed pawns are dangerous and they have to be stopped. Assuming that the pawn can not be captured we can stop them by:

• attacking the square in front of the pawn
• or placing a piece in front of the pawn

The player with the passed pawn will try to use all the tactical weapons to eliminate the piece that prevents the pawn to queen.
But this will be something of a future lesson. Now we are going to create a passed pawn.

The diagrams below illustrate a rather famous example about the creation of a passed pawn.

At first sight the position looks about even, but White’s pawns are allready on the fifth rank.

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Tags: Chess, Endgame.
Categories: Chess lessons, Intermediate 3 // Add Comment »