It has been a busy few weeks for the avid chess spectator.  Last week I was at the Vic. Youth Chess Championships to give a lecture and supply some after-the-game analysis.   The tournament was won by the top seed, Kayson Wang with a perfect score but you would have to say that he was a little lucky.  It all came down to his game against the second seed, Alistair McCutcheon, and when I strolled over to see what was happening Alistair was a pawn up in a knight ending with 1 minute 45 seconds on his clock to Kayson’s 2 minutes 15 seconds.   Could Alistair win or would Kayson ..read more

My topic for today is books.  I have too many of them.   When you want to move house and downsize that’s a problem.  My solution has been to give half of them away.   “That must have been traumatic” grandmaster Ian Rogers commented, but it had to be done sometime.   The MV Anderson Chess Collection at the State Library of Victoria took 29 boxes, mainly foreign books and magazines, and were quite pleased as on looking into the first box she opened the librarian said “we haven’t got about 50% of these!”    The Melbourne Chess Club received 16 large plastic tubs ..read more

I’ve been busy lately gearing up for the opening of the Chess Kids Academy (Saturday) on 5th May which I’m really looking forward to.  Our topic for discussion is “How to become a chess master” and the panel of IM James Morris, IM Kanan Izzat and myself will describe what we had to do to become chess masters and then discuss what the students need to do to follow in our footsteps. In general the junior who breaks through to become a master will be the one who is the keenest, who has worked the hardest and has done things that his rivals didn’t manage to do.  I have a few stories to i ..read more

One of the interesting things about chess is the different playing styles of players.  Some players love attacking and analysing imaginative lines of play; others prefer a positional style and try to just outplay their opponents by accumulating small positional advantages; others love the endgame and will swap off into an equal endgame confident that they can outplay their opponent and some are perfectionists who always look for the best move then get into time trouble and usually play a few imperfect moves. In tennis some of the best matches to watch are between players of different styl ..read more

I’ve recently been appointed Director of Coaching at the Chess Kids Academy and today was my first session with the students, and the last day of the first term.  I’ve been working hard organising a timetable and subjects for the lessons. The Academy day starts at 8.30am when the students arrive and play 5 minute challenge games against the coaches.  I managed to win all my lightning games despite being a little out of practice.  We then moved on to our “chess topics” session in which we try to educate the students in some aspect of chess – like, ratings, titles, on-line chess ..read more

The Australia Day long weekend is a popular date on the Australian chess calendar as on that date many of Australia’s top chess players head to Ballarat for the Ballarat Begonia Open.  The 52nd incarnation of this tournament! This year the tournament boasted 4 grandmasters (Smirnov, Zhao, Ly and Johansen) plus IM’s Morris, Ikeda and Solomon heading a field of 131 players.  I stayed there for the whole week-end to support my students who were playing and I even found time to visit the begonias and take some beautiful pictures. Ian Rogers doing the game commentary. One of the best th ..read more

What do you do when you are down on material and losing the game?   Some players stake everything on a tactical chance which doesn’t work but they hope their opponent may miss it.  If the opponent spots the tactic they are dead.   Others may tend to get dejected and resign themselves to losing …. going down without much of a fight. The best approach of course is to dig in and try to make it as hard as possible for your opponent to finish you off.  After all, the longer the game goes the great the chance your opponent may miss something and let you back into the game. I ..read more

As a chess coach, what do you think is my biggest battle in trying to teach kids how to play better?  It’s to get them to stop analysing and rather to try to understand what is happening in the position and instead to look for ideas. On seeing a position most children just launch into analysis.   “What can I threaten?” ….. “Do I have an attack?” and so on.   I had a class last Wednesday where I tried to explain to the students that if you are trying to solve a puzzle for example, there are in fact four things that you need to think about. What do I want to do? What does he want ..read more

A couple of weeks ago I was at the Australian Junior Championships, along with many other chess coaches, and was chatting to Carl Gorka.  “Is Ian Rogers here” I enquired?  “Yes” Carl replied, “I’ve just been watching him coach some of his students …. it’s funny you know but Ian tells his students what they should have done whereas you ask them what they should have done.” I’ve never really thought about this much but certainly my approach has always been rather than teach my students the solution to a puzzle I try to teach them how to solve the puzzle.  It’s like the old saying ..read more

The first school term for 2018 is starting shortly and I’m looking forward to getting back into the swing of chess lessons particularly as next week will see the opening of the Chess Kids Academy for 2018.  Unfortunately I’ll miss the first day, as I’m going to Brisbane to watch the Davis Cup tennis match against Germany, but over the holidays I have been working hard compiling material for the Academy students. My special subject is “strategy” so I thought that today I’d say a few words on what sort of strategy you should adopt when playing a much higher rated opponent.  There are b ..read more