Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Chess Links for Kids and Beginners

I have been thinking about my next lesson for the kids I teach, surfing around the web to see if there is anything interesting out there to share with them. Among the sites I like to look through are the following, which I'd recommend to kids and beginners:

Chess Kids Academy
http://www.chesskids.com
There is some really great content here for kids--probably the best on the web. There are just two small issues with the site: (1) it is from England, so some things are more British-focused and (2) it is not very user-friendly to navigate and you do have to poke around to find the best stuff. The site navigation at the top takes a minute to load, so be patient. You can also use the "site map." But once you get the hang of this site it has a lot to offer for kids and beginners.

Chess is Fun by Jon Edwards
http://www.princeton.edu/~jedwards/cif/intro.html
An American correspondence chess champion and New Jersey native covers the basics and beyond.

Chess Lessons from Beginner to Master from Logical Chess
http://www.logicalchess.com/resources/lessons/index.html
A great set of tutorials for kids and their parents from the Huntsville Chess Club's "Logical Chess" website. Be sure to try all of the links.

Chess Corner
http://www.chesscorner.com/
A fun site that covers a lot of basics.

U.S. Chess – Beginners
http://www.uschess.org/beginners/
The United States Chess Federation (USCF) website has a good section for beginners and scholastic players. It’s a good idea to become a member of the USCF at some point in order to participate in tournaments.

Novice Nook by Dan Heisman
http://www.chesscafe.com/heisman/heisman.htm
A very popular monthly column by a Philly-area chess teacher. Some of the material may be too advanced for a true beginner, but it is all very worthwhile to study as you make progress.

Scholastic Chess by Steve Goldberg
http://www.chesscafe.com/scholastic/scholastic.htm
A good monthly column devoted to teaching kids chess. It often links to interesting sites on the net.

Susan Polgar on Chess by GM Susan Polgar
http://www.chesscafe.com/polgar/polgar.htm
A monthly column by America’s greatest chess promoter.

Susan Polgar Chess Blog by GM Susan Polgar
http://susanpolgar.blogspot.com/
A web log or journal by the grandmaster, which often features fun chess art.

Chessgames.com
http://www.chessgames.com/
A fun place to play over famous and recent chess games, with user comments. You can never go wrong as a beginner by simply playing over lots of master games, simply to get a sense of how the pieces typically develop and what sort of patterns emerge.

The Kenilworth Chess Club by Michael Goeller
http://www.kenilworthchessclub.org/
A website for our club, featuring an extensive set of links to other sites and a frequently updated web log called “The Kenilworthian.”

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

http://exetercc.technocool.net/chessweb/index2.html
Exeter Chess is a worthy resource as well.

Michael Goeller said...

Thanks for the additional link. I was going to include the Exeter Chess club site but was annoyed to find that I could not easily link to things directly there without being forced back to the main page. Somehow the specific link you sent does not have that problem. Thanks!

Anonymous said...

Thanks for noticing us...
I'm not sure what's going wrong for Michael, I can't replicate it at my end. If people are still having problems, please let me know.

Anonymous said...

please ignore incorrect link in comment below!

Beginner Chester said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Beginner Chester said...

This site has some information for the absolute beginner. It's easy to read, has pics etc. May be worth including??

http://beginnerchess.org