Chess Teaching

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 be replayed below, but I think that the most interesting part of the game are the last moves starting from the position in the diagram below.

This is a mate in four exercise. Can you solve it, or do you have to look at the full game?
The mating pattern is rather nice.
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Tags: Chess, Game.
Categories: Chess lessons, Intermediate 3 // Add Comment »

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.

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

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 figure out how to exploit that Black’s king is almost smothered.

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

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, Tactics.
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 »