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Knight Shadow

At Friday’s club meeting, we showed a video on achieving checkmate with only a King and Queen.  The Queen is used to drive the opponent’s King into a corner by using the Knight’s shadow technique. Care must be taken to leave some room for the opponent’s King to move, to avoid a stalemate position. The King then drives up the board to support the queen in the final checkmate move.

There is also a good article on Wikipedia that describes checkmate with only a King and Queen.

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Fried Liver Attack

fried_liver_200x200At this morning’s chess club meeting, we showed a Chesskid.com video on the Fried Liver Attack opening.

Chesskid.com Video

The Fried Liver Attack, also called the Fegatello Attack (named after an Italian idiom meaning “dead as a piece of liver”), is a chess opening. This colorfully named opening is a variation of the Two Knights Defense in which White sacrifices a knight for an attack on Black’s king.

The Fried Liver has been known for many centuries, the earliest known example being a game played by Giulio Cesare Polerio in about 1610.

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Laurel Mountain Tournament This Weekend

The last scholastic tournament of the school year is this Saturday, April 11th at Laurel Mountain Elementary.  There will be NO onsite registration, and your last chance to register online is this Wednesday, April 8th by midnight.  This tournament has a 400 player cap and they are already at 390, so if you are planning to attend, you should click the registration link below.

Laurel Mountain Elementary chess tournament website

Tournament registration website

Good luck to all of our students this weekend!

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Scholar’s Mate

Scholars Mate

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.

 

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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.