Posts Tagged ‘colorado’
Renaissance Festival Chess Playing Monks
Every summer Larkspur, Colorado has a Renaissance Festival which not only is a great history learning experience and a great deal of fun but which has chess playing monks who play the public. The chess tables were started by Chess Expert Richard Buchannon of Colorado Springs many years ago and is still active today. Every summer Richard recruits young gifted players to dress up as monks and play alongside the adults. It is especially fun to see gifted chess kids beat the adults.
Many years ago it was at this Renaissance Festival where I played these chess playing monks that I decided to get back into chess and play in chess tournaments. Whenever there is a chance to expose the public to the wonderful game of chess it brings people back to the game of kings. They might have played as kids and remembered loving the game. But then they got older and adult responsibilities took over. Getting a chance to play a real tournament chess player reminds them of how much they loved the game. Sometimes, like with me, it brings them back to the game of chess.
Creating a Passed Pawn in Chess
The most important rule about passed pawns to know is that two connected passed pawns, if you can get them to the sixth rank, are worth seven points. It’s as if suddenly an extra rook appeared on the board for you, if you can get them there. It can be worth a piece sacrifice to get them there, and you will suddenly find your opponent willing to do just about anything to get rid of them, including sacrificing his own pieces. If you have a pawn majority, meaning you have one more pawn than your opponent, then, so long as they are not doubled, you can create a passed pawn if they are pushed far enough up the board (ie. especially the sixth rank). Because then if you have to sacrifice a pawn to get your opponent’s pawn out of the way, you get to queen your pawn. And since you’re closer to the eighth rank, you queen first. So even if your opponent gets a passer, he won’t be able to queen it. For a very instructive game about pawns on the sixth, take a look at Grigory Serper vs Ioannis Nikolaidis 1993 St. Petersburg Open.
The Lucena Chess Position
One of the most important and basic things to learn in chess is the Lucena Position. When you have a pawn, a king and a rook, and your opponent has only a king and a rook, it can still be very difficult to win. But if you can get to the Lucena Position you can win from there. Sometimes the trick is getting there. Sometimes your opponent can stop you from getting there, but if you at least know what it is you are trying to achieve, that is, the position from which you can win, then you will win a lot of games you could have drawn. Take a good look at the position you need to get to in the diagram. It’s White to move. First check the king. If the king blocks the file where Black would check if the king were to e7, then it’s a synch! You can queen the pawn next move. But if the black king moves to the “c” file, then you need to build a bridge. You do this buy letting black check you and moving in front of the pawn. Then you move one square diagonal from the pawn and toward the rook. Then when the rook checks you again you move back in front of the pawn, only this time you leave one square between the king and the pawn. Then when the rook checks you again, you block with the rook. That’s called building a bridge. Now there is no way to stop the pawn. This is named after a man named Lucena who lived the late 1400′s in Salamanca, Spain. They don’t know much about him, but they do know that there is a famous Roman bridge in Salamanca. Who knows, maybe that’s where he got the idea.
Chess Tactics
Tactics puzzles are a must for anyone wanting to improve their chess game. It is a good idea to try and do ten minutes a day of tactics puzzles, or three puzzles a day, spending only a short amount of time on each puzzle and then checking to see if you got the answer. This way you get into the habit of looking for puzzles, and you see lots of tactical patterns over and over again. You can find tactics books, tactics puzzles online, often the newspaper will have a tactics puzzle, or you can even purchase software like Ct-art that generates tactics puzzles for you to solve. Colorado chess player and former editor of the Colorado Chess Informant has a section he publishes called Tactics Time that he has turned into a website full of tactics puzzles from real games, which is particularly useful, as these are tactics that have actually come up and either been missed by the player, or that actually happened in the game. Tactics are fun and are what make chess sparks fly! You can also check out CheckMates Chess Academy’s Online Resources for Chess Puzzles divided by skill level.
Child Prodigy in Colorado
Twelve year old Jackson Chen is the current winner of the Colorado Scholastic Closed. He is considered a child chess prodigy, capable of beating masters, and certainly the rest of us chess players too! Technically, and perhaps unofficially, the definition of “chess prodigy” is a chess player whose USCF rating is 800 points highter than their age. So under this definition he was a prodigy up until he turned twelve. If he wants to be a prodigy now he needs to achieve the rating of 2000, and become an “expert.”
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