The tactics portion of my coaching notebook is coming along.

I’ve been working with a lot of younger kids this year, and they’ve been highlighting the need for some sort of methodical instruction in those areas, and all of my usual teaching aids are too advanced for them. The first thing I need to work with them on is simply seeing the pieces they can capture. I’m starting to drill into them that the first question they should ask themselves is, “What can I capture?”

When you’ve advanced, you sometimes forget how hard the early steps were to make. When you start going over the thinking process of a chess player, you don’t always realize what you’ve been doing for so long that it’s almost unconscious. And it’s that part of the instruction that I’m finding most valuable to my own play. The kids are forcing me to examine my own thinking in detail, looking for those simple things I do without being conscious of it, so that I can find a way to communicate it to them.

And of course, as I do so, I find habits, conscious and unconscious, thay I’ve developed over the years, which are inefficient or just plain wrong. And another hole gets plugged.

I might make 1900 yet.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 at 12:10 am and is filed under General, Instruction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.