Chess Teaching » Pictures

Beautiful chess (2)

Chess Teacher — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 14:52:43 +0000

As a kind of follow-up on the previous post I’ll have to show you this picture from Cindy Seigle. This is one of the many beautiful chess sets set up in the atrium at the West Baden Springs Hotel in Orange County, Indiana.

Chess set at the West Baden Springs Hotel by cindy47452

Beautiful chess

Chess Teacher — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 14:30:08 +0000

Chess is often played with beautiful pieces. This is one of the reasons to start playing chess. We like the pieces and we like the game. The picture below illustrates some of this beauty.

Chess by frankblacknoir

Chess collage

Chess Teacher — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 10:40:21 +0000

Tag Galaxy is a 2008 diploma thesis project by Steven Wood that enables you to browse through the galaxy of pictures by entering tags. After entering a tag related tags are shown visualized by other planets in an orbit around the “world” of selected tags.
You’ll have to see it for yourself.

The picture above is the resulting chess+game+king+board world.

Zugzwang

Chess Teacher — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 15:36:43 +0000

Zugzwang is a position in which every move would make the position worse, and the player that has to move would be better off if he could pass and not move at all. But in chess no such thing as skipping a move is allowed. You are forced to move.
In the picture above whoever has to make a move loses.

We have seen some examples of zugzwang before:

The Trébuchet was in fact a lesson about the mutual zugzwang.
The game Fischer – Taimanov (1971) contains some zugzwangs.
Opposition can be seen as an example of Zugzwang.
And in fact most of the endgames that we have discussed before, like the mating with the rook, make use of this zugzwang concept.

Next lesson: Make a plan.

Chess Fantasy Art

Chess Teacher — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 16:35:10 +0000

This is a reduced part of a beautiful chess image of which the original can be found at the site of Fantasy Art 3D Wallpapers: modern digital art, 3D artists, computer desktop backgrounds.

The mentioned site contains a lot of beautiful pictures, but this one is my favorite. It illustrates the beauty of chess.

The Elephant Trap

Chess Teacher — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 10:24:08 +0000

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.

Elephant_Trap

1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.Bg5 Nbd7

It seems that White is able to win a pawn by 5.cxd5 exd5 followed by 6.Nxd5??

It seems that the knight is pinned, but White should have sticked to something like 6.e3

6… Nxd5! Black just captures the knight 7.Bxd8 and White takes the queen. At this moment it turns out that after the check 7...Bb4+ White has only one legal move 8.Qd2 Bxd2+ 9.Kxd2 Kxd8 and Black has won a piece

Another interesting trap is the Lasker Trap, but for now we continue with explaining some of the more difficult Chess Notation Symbols.