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The Library
Chess guides, written properly
Twenty-one openings from both sides, and seven complete guides to the rest of the game. No fluff, no filler — the plans, the structures and the mistakes that actually decide games.
Most chess content online is either a wall of variations nobody remembers or a list of principles too vague to use. These guides are written the way a coach explains an opening across a board: what the first moves are for, the handful of plans that recur in every game, the pawn structure that decides which squares exist, and the specific mistakes that lose. Every opening is covered twice — once for the player using it and once for the player facing it — because knowing how to play the French and knowing how to beat it are different skills that happen to share a name.
Everything here is free and everything here is playable. Each guide ends on a live board where you can try the structure against a real engine and have every move rated afterwards, which is the part that actually turns reading into rating points.
Complete guides
Seven guides covering everything the Academy teaches, each one the full write-up rather than a single drill.
- How Every Chess Piece Moves — Every piece, every rule, every square it can reach — the complete beginner's guide.
- The Chess Rules Most Players Get Wrong — Castling, en passant, promotion, stalemate and the draw rules — explained properly.
- Checkmate Patterns Every Player Should Know — Back-rank, smothered, Anastasia's, the Arabian and the rest — the shapes that end games.
- Chess Tactics: Forks, Pins, Skewers and Discovered Attacks — The five tactical motifs that decide most club games, with the patterns behind them.
- Chess Endgames: What You Actually Need to Know — Opposition, king and pawn, the Lucena and the Philidor — the endgames that occur.
- Chess Strategy: Structure, Squares and Long-Term Plans — Weak squares, outposts, the bishop pair, pawn majorities and how to make a plan.
- Chess Opening Principles That Actually Matter — Control the centre, develop, castle — and the reasons behind each, with the exceptions.
Opening guides
Twenty-one openings, each written twice — once for the player using it and once for the player facing it, because those are genuinely different problems.
Chess variants
Twenty variants, each with a complete guide — the rules, the plans, the mistakes, and what each one teaches you about standard chess. Every one is playable free in the browser, and almost nobody else has written about most of them properly.
- Crazyhouse — Captured pieces switch sides and can be dropped back on the board.
- Chess960 (Fischer Random) — The back rank is shuffled — 960 possible starting positions, no opening theory.
- King of the Hill — Get your king to one of the four central squares and you win instantly.
- Three-Check Chess — Check your opponent three times and you win — checkmate optional.
- Horde Chess — White has 36 pawns and no other pieces. Black has a normal army.
- Racing Kings — Both kings race for the eighth rank. No checks allowed, ever.
- Antichess (Losing Chess) — Capturing is compulsory and losing all your pieces wins the game.
- Really Bad Chess — Randomised armies — you might get three queens, your opponent might get five knights.
- No-Castling Chess — Everything is standard except castling is illegal. Proposed by Vladimir Kramnik.
- Pawn Battle — Pawns and kings only. First to promote wins.
- Upside-Down Chess — The pieces and pawns swap ranks — pawns on the back, pieces in front.
- Knight Odds — White plays without a knight — the classic teaching handicap.
- Rook Odds — White plays without a rook — a serious handicap for a serious gap.
- Queen Odds — White plays without the queen — the largest classical handicap.
- Endgame Arena — Start straight in an endgame — no opening, no middlegame.
- Mirror Random — A randomised back rank, identical for both sides.
- Double Random — Both back ranks randomised independently — the armies do not match.
- Peasants' Revolt — One side has a king and eight pawns; the other has a king, four knights and a pawn.
- Light Brigade — One side gets a queen and pawns; the other gets minor pieces and pawns.
- Standard Chess — The original — and still the deepest game on the board.
Coaching, parents & scholastic chess
The practical side of chess — tournaments, teaching, and improvement — that nobody else writes guides about. Grouped so you can find your lane.
Tournaments explained
Everything a first-time family needs to walk into a tournament and understand what is happening.
- Blitz vs Rapid vs Classical: What Each Trains — Blitz, rapid and classical are not three difficulty levels of the same game. They train different skills, feed different ratings, and reward different habits. Get the mix wrong and a child can play hundreds of games a month while learning almost nothing.
- Chess Tournament Etiquette: The Unwritten Rules — Nobody hands you a manners booklet at your first tournament, yet everyone in the hall seems to know a set of rules that aren't printed anywhere. Most of them exist for one reason: two people are thinking hard three feet apart, and anything that breaks that concentration is a problem. Here is what the room expects of you, what merely irritates people, and the short list of things that can actually cost you the game.
- Do We Need a US Chess Membership? — Short answer: only if your child is playing in US Chess rated events. Plenty of children play for years at clubs and casual tournaments without a membership, and children in grade 3 or below can often play rated scholastic events free through the JTP programme. This guide covers exactly when you need to pay, what you get, and when to hold off.
- How Chess Clocks and Time Controls Work — The clock is the one piece of tournament equipment that scares new players more than any opponent. It shouldn't. A chess clock is just two timers joined at the hip: yours runs while you think, your opponent's runs while they think, and pressing your button swaps them over. This guide covers reading the notation on a tournament flyer, the difference between increment and delay, and the handling rules that actually get enforced.
- How Chess Tournament Pairings Are Decided — Halfway through every scholastic tournament a parent asks the same question: who decides these pairings, and why does my child keep getting Black? The short answer is a set of published rules called the Swiss system, applied by a computer. This guide walks through what the software is actually doing, so the pairing sheet stops looking random.
- How Do Chess Tournament Tiebreaks Work? — Two children finish a five-round tournament on the same score. One takes the trophy home and the other doesn't, and nobody at the table can explain why. That gap is filled by tiebreaks, and they are far less mysterious than the crosstable makes them look.
- How Does a Swiss System Chess Tournament Work? — Almost every chess tournament your child will ever enter runs on the Swiss system, and almost nobody explains it before round 1. The short version: everyone plays every round, winners play winners, and nobody goes home early. Here is how the machinery actually works, and how to read the sheets on the wall without asking a stranger.
- How Long Do Chess Tournaments Last? — Plan for a full day. A typical one-day scholastic tournament runs five to eight hours door to door, and the schedule on the flyer tells you almost everything if you know how to read it. Here is what actually determines the length, format by format, so you can plan food, siblings and the drive home.
- How to Handle Nerves at a Chess Tournament — Every player gets nervous at tournaments, from six-year-olds at their first scholastic event to grandmasters in title matches. The goal is not to eliminate nerves. It is to have a routine that keeps them at a useful level, and a plan for the moments when they spike.
- How to Prepare the Week Before a Chess Tournament — The last week before a tournament is not for getting better at chess. It is for arriving rested, sharp, and organised, with the chess you already know sitting close to the surface. Most players get this backwards: they cram hardest in the final days and turn up tired.
- How to Run a Scholastic Chess Tournament — A five-round Swiss for forty children takes about four hours and needs one thing you probably do not have yet: a plan for what happens when someone cries.
- Is My Child Ready for Their First Chess Tournament? — The question is almost never about strength. A child rated nothing at all can have a wonderful first tournament, and a strong one can have a miserable afternoon. What decides it is whether they can handle a long game, a loss, and a room full of silence.
- Rated or Unrated Chess Tournament First? — Most scholastic events offer both rated and unrated sections, and the entry form makes you choose. The honest answer is that it matters less than parents fear, but the timing still deserves five minutes of thought. Here is what actually changes when a game counts, and how to decide.
- The Touch Move Rule in Chess, Explained — Touch move is the rule that catches more new tournament players than any other. It's simple to state, easy to break under pressure, and the source of most disputes at scholastic events. Here is exactly what it requires, what the exceptions are, and how to train the habit before it costs your child a game.
- What Is a Bye in a Chess Tournament? — A bye is a round where your child doesn't play a game but still gets a score for it. It sounds simple until the wall chart shows a 1 next to one kid's skipped round and a half next to another's. The difference matters, and knowing the rules in advance can save a wasted Saturday or a lost prize.
- What Is a Quad Chess Tournament? — A quad is four players in a group, each playing the other three. Three games, everyone plays everyone, nobody is eliminated and nobody sits out. For a first rated experience it is kinder than a Swiss and easier for a coach to run.
- What Is a Round Robin Chess Tournament? — A round robin is the simplest tournament format in chess: every player plays every other player, and the highest score wins. Most big scholastic events use the Swiss system instead, so the first round robin often catches families off guard. Here is how the format works, where your child will actually meet it, and why it rewards a different kind of play.
- What to Bring to a Chess Tournament: Full Checklist — A scholastic chess tournament is an all-day event, and most of what goes wrong for first-time families has nothing to do with the chess. It's a hungry child, a missing clock, or a parent stuck on a hard floor for six hours with nothing to read. Here is the full list, and the reason behind every item on it.
- Your Child's First Chess Tournament: The Day Itself — A one-day scholastic tournament is mostly waiting, punctuated by four or five games your child plays alone in a room you cannot enter. Once you know the rhythm — check-in, pairings, round, skittles room, repeat — the day stops being mysterious and starts being manageable. Here is how it actually runs, hour by hour.
For parents
Starting a child in chess, keeping them in it, and the questions every chess parent asks.
- Best Chess Books for Kids, Matched to Level — Walk into any scholastic chess tournament and ask the coaches what their students are reading, and you'll hear the same dozen titles again and again. The list barely changes from decade to decade, because the classics work. What changes is the order — the right book at 500 is a waste of money at 1100, and vice versa.
- Chess Progress by Age: What to Realistically Expect — Parents ask this question expecting a chart: age on one axis, rating on the other. There isn't a useful one, because the honest bands are enormous and the child's age turns out to be one of the weakest predictors of progress. Here is what the bands actually look like, and the four things that matter far more than the candles on the cake.
- Chess Ratings Explained — A Guide for Parents — Your child came home with a number and you have no idea whether it is good. Here is what it means, without the jargon.
- Does Chess Count as Screen Time? — Online chess happens on a screen, so yes, it counts. But a 15-minute game where your child calculates every move has almost nothing in common with an hour of autoplay videos, and treating them the same leads to bad rules. The useful question isn't whether chess is screen time — it's what kind, and how to keep it the good kind.
- Getting Your Daughter Started in Chess — Your daughter will likely walk into a room where most of the players are boys. That changes nothing about how good she can get, but it changes a few practical decisions you should make early. This guide covers what the participation data actually shows, how girls' sections and all-girls events work, and how to build the thing that keeps girls in the game: community.
- How Does My Child Get an Official Chess Rating? — A rating is not a score or a grade. It is a prediction: this number says how likely you are to beat someone with a different number. Understanding that one sentence prevents most of the misery parents feel about ratings.
- How Much Should My Child Practise Chess? — Fifteen minutes a day beats two hours on Sunday, and it is not close. Chess improvement is pattern recognition, and patterns need repeated exposure over time rather than one long session your child ends up dreading.
- How to Build a Homeschool Chess Curriculum — Chess holds up surprisingly well as a formal homeschool subject. It has published curricula with clear levels, it produces work you can file in a portfolio, and progress can be measured in numbers rather than vague impressions. This guide covers the timetable, the materials, and how to record what your child has actually learned.
- How to Teach a Child Chess — The First Ten Lessons — Do not teach all the pieces at once. Here is the sequence that works, one lesson at a time.
- How to Teach a Kid Chess Notation in Two Weeks — At most rated tournaments, players from around fourth grade up are expected to write down every move of every game. A child who has never held a pen at the board will lose time, lose focus, and sometimes lose the game over it. The skill itself is small — most kids can learn it in two weeks of short daily practice.
- Is Chess Good for Kids? An Honest Look — Chess is genuinely good for children, and most of the reasons given for it are overstated. Here is a straight account.
- Is Online Chess Safe for Kids? — The chess is safe. Thirty-two pieces, sixty-four squares, and an opponent who can only move them — nothing in the game itself can hurt a child. The risk lives in everything bolted onto the game: chat boxes, direct messages, friend requests, and profiles. Lock those down and online chess is one of the safest things a child can do on a screen.
- My Child Keeps Losing at Chess and Wants to Quit — Every chess player who ever got good spent long stretches losing. That's no comfort to a nine-year-old in tears after their fourth defeat of the day, and it's not much comfort to the parent watching. But there is a practical playbook for this moment, and most of it comes down to what you say in the car on the way home.
- My Child Wants to Quit Chess. Now What? — When a child announces they want to quit chess, the announcement is rarely the whole story. Sometimes it means exactly what it says. More often it means something specific has gone wrong — too many tournaments, a rating that has stalled, a best friend who left the club — and that specific thing can usually be fixed. Your job in the first week is diagnosis, not decision.
- Practising Chess With Your Child When You Can't Play — Plenty of strong junior players have parents who can barely move the pieces. What those parents provide isn't chess knowledge — it's structure, company, and consistency. This is the practical version: what to actually do, twice or three times a week, when you can't tell a good move from a bad one.
- What Age Should a Child Start Chess? — The short answer is around five or six for the rules and seven or eight for real games. The longer answer is that age matters much less than how you introduce it.
- What Chess Set Should I Buy for My Child? — The set your child learns on should be the set they will play on at club and at tournaments. That means one specific thing: a plain Staunton plastic set on a vinyl board, not the glass, magnetic or themed sets that dominate the toy aisle. This guide covers exactly what to buy, why clubs standardised on it, and when a clock enters the picture.
For coaches & clubs
Running lessons, classes, clubs and a coaching business — the practical side nobody else writes about.
- A First Chess Lesson Plan That Actually Works — The first lesson with a new student is the one you can least afford to wing. You're doing three jobs at once: measuring what they actually know, proving the lessons are worth coming back to, and setting the habit of working between sessions. Here is a structure that does all three in sixty minutes.
- Are Chess Summer Camps Worth It? — A week of chess camp costs real money, and the brochures all promise the same things: focus, confidence, strategic thinking. Some camps deliver a genuine jump in playing strength; others are expensive childcare with a chess set in the room. The difference is visible before you pay, if you know what to look for.
- Chess Club or Private Coach — Which Does Your Child Need? — Most parents buy these in the wrong order. One-to-one coaching is the most expensive option and, for a beginner, usually the least effective — not because coaching does not work, but because what a beginner needs most is games, and a club provides those far more cheaply.
- Chess Homework Students Actually Do — Most chess homework dies quietly. The student nods at the end of the lesson, the week happens, and next session you're both pretending the assignment never existed. The fix isn't more discipline from the student. It's better design from you.
- How Much Do Chess Coaches Charge? — Most private chess coaching in the US sits somewhere between 20 and 100 dollars an hour, with grandmasters charging well above that and group classes costing far less per child. The spread is wide because title, format, location and demand all pull on the price. This guide lays out the typical ranges and, more usefully, how to judge whether a given fee is fair.
- How to Become a Chess Coach — You do not need a title. You need to be roughly 400 points stronger than your students, organised, and able to explain one idea at a time.
- How to Choose a Chess Coach for Your Child — The strongest player available is usually not the right coach, and a coach's own rating tells you almost nothing about whether your child will improve. What matters is whether they can find the one thing your child is doing wrong and make them want to fix it.
- How to Get Chess Coaching Students — Most coaches wait for students to find them, then wonder why the diary stays empty. Students come from four places: schools, parents' groups, tournaments, and referrals from families you already teach. This guide covers how to work each channel, with the actual words to use.
- How to Keep Young Chess Students Engaged — Kids don't quit chess because chess is boring. They quit because the lesson is the same shape every week: demonstration, worksheet, game, pack up. The fix isn't more energy from you — it's a variety system you can run on autopilot, so every session feels different while the teaching underneath stays consistent.
- How to Plan a Chess Camp That Actually Works — A chess camp is not five club sessions stapled together. It is six hours a day of the same children, and the schedule either carries you or buries you. Get the block structure, the staffing ratio, and the pricing shape right before you print a single flyer.
- How to Set Up Online Chess Coaching — Teaching chess online needs exactly two things working at once: a board both of you can move pieces on, and a voice channel that doesn't drop. Everything else — assignments, scheduling, payment — is admin you can bolt on afterwards. This guide covers the toolkit that actually holds up across a season of lessons, and the failure points that quietly cost coaches students.
- How to Start a Chess Club at Your School — Most school chess clubs die in the third week. Not from lack of interest — from lack of structure. Here is the version that survives.
- How to Teach Chess Openings to Beginners — Beginners don't lose games in the opening. They lose them by hanging a knight on move 14, long after the opening is over. Teach principles first, keep the memorised part to three moves, and spend the saved time on tactics — this guide covers exactly how to run that.
- How to Teach a Chess Class With Mixed Levels — Every real chess class has a kid who just learned how the knight moves sitting three feet from a kid with a tournament rating. Teach to the middle and you lose both of them. The fix is structural, not heroic: sort the room, rotate stations, and give every band work that actually fits.
- Using Chess Variants to Teach — A Coach's Guide — Variants are not a break from real chess. Used deliberately, each one isolates a single skill and drills it harder than any exercise.
Improving your own game
For the adult or teen player who wants to actually get better, not just play more.
- Chess Visualization Training: Drills That Work — Every calculation error past move two is really a visualization error: the board in your head drifted away from the board on the table. The good news is that visualization is a trainable skill with a clear ladder of drills, not a talent you either have or don't. Ten accurate minutes a day beats an hour on Sunday.
- First Chess Lessons at Home: A 4-Week Plan — The most common way parents teach chess is to explain all six pieces in one sitting and then play a full game. It fails almost every time, because the child is holding thirty rules in their head before they've enjoyed a single one. Here is the order that works, spread over four weeks, with the mistakes to skip.
- How Many Chess Openings Should You Actually Learn? — Three. One opening for White, one defence against 1.e4, one defence against 1.d4. That covers the vast majority of games you will ever play, and for most improving players the real question is not how many openings to learn but how deep to go in each one — which depends almost entirely on your rating.
- How Much Tactics Training Do You Actually Need? — Everyone tells improving players to do more tactics. Almost nobody tells them how much, at what difficulty, or when to stop. This guide gives you actual numbers, a repetition schedule that makes motifs stick, and the signs that puzzles are no longer the thing holding you back.
- How to Analyze Your Own Chess Games — Most players finish a game, click the engine button, nod at the coloured bar, and learn nothing. The method coaches teach is the reverse: record what you were thinking, analyse the game with your own head, and only then let the engine check your work. It is slower, and that is exactly why it works.
- How to Break a Chess Rating Plateau — Every improving player hits a wall where the rating graph goes flat for months. The problem is almost never effort — it's that the training no longer matches the actual leak in your play. This guide shows you how to diagnose the real weakness, then gives you a six-week protocol to close it.
- How to Set Realistic Chess Goals That Stick — Most chess goals fail because they name a number and a date and nothing else. 'Reach 1600 by summer' tells you nothing about what to do on Tuesday. This guide shows you how to set goals built on actions you control, timescales that reflect how improvement actually works, and a review habit that keeps the plan honest.
- How to Stop Blundering in Chess — Most games between improving players are not won. They are lost, usually by one move that hung a piece or missed a mate. The fix is not more opening theory or another tactics book. It is a short routine you run before every move, plus a handful of drills that make the routine automatic.
- How to Track Chess Student Progress — Rating is the worst progress measure available to a coach, because it moves last. A student can be improving for three months before the number budges, and a parent staring at a flat graph will conclude nothing is happening. This guide covers what to measure instead, a record system that takes five minutes a week, and how to turn it into a report parents actually understand.
- Is Speed Chess Good or Bad for Improvement? — Every improving player asks this eventually, usually after a hundred-game blitz binge that moved their rating nowhere. The honest answer is that speed chess is neither good nor bad on its own. It's a tool, and like most tools it depends entirely on how much you use it, when, and what for.
- Learning Chess as an Adult Beginner — Nobody hands out prizes for starting chess at seven. Adults pick up the game every day and get genuinely good at it, and in some ways they learn faster than children do. What kills adult progress isn't age — it's scattered effort and expectations borrowed from stories about prodigies.
- Online Chess vs Over-the-Board: Bridging the Gap — A child with hundreds of online games can sit down at a real board and play noticeably worse than their rating suggests. The chess knowledge is all there — the habits around it are not. This guide covers exactly what transfers, what doesn't, and how to close the gap in about a month.
- The One-Hour Chess Study Plan That Compounds — One hour a day is plenty. Most players who stall aren't short of time — they spend the hour on the wrong things, usually blitz and opening videos. What matters is the split, and the right split changes as you improve.
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