General | Spicewood Elementary Chess Club

At today’s Chess Club meeting, we showed a video on how to anticipate and defend against the Scholar’s Mate. The Scholar’s Mate is sometimes referred to as the “Four-Move Checkmate”, although there are other ways to checkmate in four moves. We also introduced the students to the “Squares of Doom”, which are the weakest squares on the chess board, F2 and F7, because they are only defended by the King. The Scholar’s Mate uses this weakness of the square of doom to checkmate the King.

The Scholar’s Mate is known by different names in other countries:

In some languages, including French, Turkish, German, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese: Shepherd’s Mate
In Italian: Barber’s Mate
In Persian, Greek and Arabic: Napoleon’s Plan
In Russian: Children’s Mate
In Polish, Danish, German, Croatian, Hungarian, Slovenian, Slovakian and Hebrew: Shoemaker’s Mate
In Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish: School Mate
In Esperanto: Stultula Mato

Chesskid.com Opening Traps: Scholar’s Mate Video Link that shows examples on how to defend if your opponent bring out their Bishop first.

A followup video is also recommended to watch where they show how to defend if your opponent bring out their Queen first.

April 1, 2015

The Noble Game – A Short Film

This is a ~30 minute short film that documents scholastic chess in France. It follows kids and parents as they compete in a tournament to earn a spot in the French championship tournament. While it is in French, it has subtitles and worth watching to get a better understanding of the tournament experience.

March 31, 2015

Flickr integration

Just testing the integration of Flickr photos into a post. Here are some photos from past tournaments.

Here is the link to our photostream.

[slickr-flickr tag=”Tournaments”]

March 27, 2015

3 Things to Consider

March 13, 2015March 26, 2015

Understanding Pawn Structure

This video was shown during our Friday Chess Club meeting about basic pawn structures.

March 9, 2015March 9, 2015

Hungarian Chess Set

Searching on Ebay, one can come across some interesting Chess related items. The photos below are of a Hungarian chess set made of sterling silver, gold and enameled with stones. The item description states it was once owned by a royal family. Can you guess how much they are selling it for? $180,000! Who knows if they will get someone to buy it, but just look at the level of detail that went into making it! I particularly like the horses coming out of the corners of the board but I would worry that if I played chess on it, I might break it and have to buy it!