How to teach your kids to play and master chess (even if you don't know the game) – Part 2: Basic Checkmating Patterns

*Republished from my personal blog at leonardl.ee

Now that you know all the rules of chess and how the game is set up, starts and ends, it’s time to move on to basic checkmating patterns and drawn endings.

But before we begin, you can go to lichess.org for a basic refresher, under the section Chess Pieces. You can also play a few games with an experienced player of training partner just to get the feel of the game. However if you’re unable to find someone to help out, just play a few games with the lichess computer at lichess.org. The objective is just to get familiar with the rules.

If you recall, I mentioned that there was an error in the photo from Part 1. The Black King is always on a light square and the White King is always on a dark square in the starting positions (shown above). Congrats if you spotted it!

Lesson Six: Basic Checkmating Patterns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdC7bZo2STg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKXGXFhxT3Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKXGXFhxT3Q

For now, it is NOT necessary to learn how to checkmate a lone King with a Knight and Bishop. This is a very advanced technique and this scenario seldom occurs in games, so we will pick it up at a later stage. *If you’re picking up the game super fast and can’t keep yourself from learning this by yourself or via Youtube, you might be a prodigy…! ??

Now let’s learn and understand the condition of stalemate and other drawn endings. It can save the game or throw away a totally won game. A stalemate game is declared a draw.

Lesson Seven: Stalemate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCiPrNRCa44

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoGVxiU2VFI

Lesson Eight: Other Drawn Endings – Insufficient Material and 3 Move Repetition

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I01DZPcMZ5Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIzV-NIWvkQ

You might have covered these lessons earlier while learning the rules. Feel free to refresh or skip these lessons based on your level of familiarity.

And there you have it, another big step towards mastering chess! Once you have understood the basic checkmating patterns and understand the conditions for the game to end in a win or draw, you can start to play more actual games! Hopefully with a human player over a physical board, but the lichess.org or chess.com computer is a good second option.

In the next installment we will look at some short examples of actual games to highlight the three stages of a chess game: the opening, the middlegame and the endgame.