Scholastic Chess Instruction:
Developing Basic Pattern Recognition

This article is primarily intended for readers involved in teaching chess to young players. Included are suggested activities for helping students imagine and force checkmate from controlled endgame positions.

For those interested in reproducible assessment and teaching materials, 33 pages of exercises are provided for free downloading. Readers who prefer to skip the details or save them for later, may preview the pages and downloadable files from here:

• 64 Problems for Recognition of Checkmate and Stalemate
• Visualization Exercises for Checkmate
• Over-The-Board Exercises for Forcing Mate

Prerequisites

Novices may become proficient at making legal moves, capturing material, playing opening tricks, and chasing their opponents' kings. At what point are they playing chess? Since the object of the game is to force checkmate, it's only when students begin to imagine and try to create specific checkmates in the heat of a game that they become chess players.

Many chess instructors advocate introducing the game from the end rather than from the beginning -- making sure students grasp the concepts of check and checkmate before focusing on beginning and middle game ideas. Having players assess positions like those in the following illustration gives much insight into their understanding of the goal of the game, and of how to reach that goal.

A five-page set of problems like those shown above can be viewed or downloaded. These are useful for training purposes as well as for pre- or post-testing of basic chess concepts.

Activities for "Static" Visualization of Checkmate

Here are example exercises that can be used to help players develop their ability to visualize checkmate positions. These do not require the student to look ahead, but only to create and assess static arrangements.

• The student starts with an empty chessboard, both kings, and 1-5 other pieces. His job is to arrange the pieces to show checkmate. (E.g., "Take out both kings and the white queen. Set them up so Black is in checkmate ... Now re-arrange them to show me another checkmate ... And another." Teams of students can be challenged to find as many distinct checkmate (or stalemate) arrangements as possible using the same material.




• Using a demonstration board or printed diagrams (see illustration), students are asked to complete patterns with specific constraints.

Instructors may place one or more chessmen on a demonstration board and ask students to find ways to create checkmate or stalemate by either 1) naming where a new piece should be added or 2) identifying which piece should be placed on a given square. In the example shown, students try to find all possible arrangements for creating stalemate by adding the kings to a board that already has a black pawn on c2. Players initially may need to physically manipulate chessmen to solve these problems, but should move toward creating and testing patterns with only their imaginations as soon as possible.

• One variation on the exercises shown above is for students to mentally (physically only if necessary) arrange chessmen on a "map". This is best explained with an illustration ...

• As players become more advanced, exercises should increasingly focus on visualization without use of a chess board. Dividing a club into teams to compete in a brief visualization quiz can be a fun and effective warm-up activity. Problems can be assigned varying amounts of points based on whether a demonstration board is visible, how many pieces are involved in the problem, or speed of response. Here are a few example questions:

Activities for "Dynamic" Visualization of Checkmate

Once players can clearly imagine checkmating patterns, exercises can be set up which require one or more moves to create these patterns.

• Here's an illustration of how one of the exercises we've already introduced can be modified slightly so that students must visualize a position after one move:

• As this type of exercise is extended, so that players must make more moves to reach a target position, students eventually end up playing mini-games. Novices as well as advanced players can enjoy and benefit from such exercises. You're invited to preview or download a large set of material related to this type of training exercise.

Activities for Visualizing Tactical Patterns

The exercises outlined above for helping students foresee checkmate and stalemate patterns can also be used for training of tactical motifs. For example, as illustrated below, students can practice finding ways in which each chessman could be used within a position to create a fork.

Other fundamental tactical patterns can be introduced and practiced using this approach. By studying the possible impact of one chessman at a time on a position, students will develop a sense of the unique strengths and weaknesses of each piece. For example, when players create arrangements for pins or skewers, the exercise quickly demonstrates differences between the long-range pieces and the king, pawns and knights. Similarly, this type of activity highlights the special advantages of queens and knights for creating forks. The author welcomes your input on the material presented in this article.