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Dear Chess Players and their Parents:
This is just a reminder that the T. H. Rogers Chess Program has a
self-paced, structured curriculum in place to help guide the students to
better play. Details about it are on our web site:
www.throgerschess.com. Look under Club Information and Policies and
then under Homework. The study materials are available through the club.
Whether you are playing recreationally or competitively, all of us want to
improve our playing ability. After you have learned the basic rules of
play (our "pawn level" test) and start getting proficient at finding one
move checkmates (our "knight level" test), the most important and
practical thing you can study to develop your playing ability is tactics.
The homework for the "bishop level" test is an introduction to the basic
tactical themes. They are taken from John Bain's Chess Tactics for
Students workbook. The bishop level problem sets are a subset of the
chess team's Level 1 homework which is to do the entire workbook.
After completing Bain's book, we recommend that the students use a
software program called Chess Tactics for Beginners. Don't let the
"beginners" designation put you off as they consider anyone with ratings
under 1600 a beginner, which is virtually our entire club. Chess
Tactics for Beginners (CTB) is a series of 1312 progressively harder
tactical exercises. It starts off deceptively simple in stage 1, but gets
quite challenging midway into the material. Because a lot of tactics is
pattern recognition, the kids will need to go through the material several
times to be able to recognize the positions quickly, so I expect they will
be using this disk for quite a while. The program itself is Russian but
works on any Windows platform. English is one of the multiple languages
you can choose from for the interface and help files. The program is
available for purchase through the club for $16. If your child outgrows
the cd, you can trade it in for the sequel or keep it and buy the sequel.
For most of our kids, that will take longer than a year.
We also recommend having the old fashioned paper and pencil workbooks
available to study from. They are good to have while sitting at your
sibling's basketball or volleyball game, or at the doctor's office, long
car rides, adult restaurants.... We have Al Woolum's Chess Tactics
Workbook for sale for $10. It differs from Bain's in that there is
not much discussion of the various tactics, just lots of practice. The
hardest problems in this workbook will be at a much lower level than the
software. But, learning tactics is all about practice and working through
numerous exercises. Some higher level challenges can be found in Fred
Reinfeld's 1001 Winning Chess Sacrifices and Combinations and his
1001 Brilliant Ways to Checkmate. Lazslo Polgar's 5334 Chess
Problems, Combinations, and Games is another excellent choice.
Winning Chess Tactics, by Yasser Seirawan and Jeremy Silman, is also a
highly recommended and thorough instructional treatment of tactics, and
provides plenty of practice problems as well. These books could be
purchased through Amazon or your local bookstore.
Remember, we give points for completing the workbooks and software.
Points are necessary to take the next level test.
Martha Jenkinson |