Tag: chess

How to Teach a Kid Play Chess

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

Chess is a game that should’ve disappeared by now. Chess engines have become so strong that humans can no longer contribute to game theory—except by coding the chess engines. Yet, YouTube is filled with funny and wildly popular chess influencers. As a result, both of my kids have taken an interest in learning the game. Now, it’s time to teach my youngest, who is 6.

Here’s my strategy for teaching the game:

  1. Show the piece movement, arrange the board and start playing
  2. Do not win! Little kids seem to love beating their parents 🙂
  3. Do not take any pieces outside of avoiding check or recapturing
  4. Encourage them to use all pieces
  5. Once you feel like the kid got a basic idea, switch to mini games
  6. Give them 2 rooks and queen vs your king. Let them find a checkmate
  7. Once they find a checkmate, give yourself a pawn and play hard
  8. Once they find a checkmate, give yourself 2 pawns. Teach them how to attack the backward pawn
  9. Once they find a checkmate, give yourself a knight. Teach them forks
  10. Keep adding pieces to the board for both sides until a real game becomes possible

Around point 10 it’s time to find a chess club. This is when the chess became a chore for both of us with the big kid. Also, finding a tick where the kids played didn’t help much. I’ll try to improve the process with the second kid, maybe find a club without ticks.

Do you play in your daily life?

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Do you play in your daily life? What says “playtime” to you?
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I do some football with the kids in warm months. I also play some bullet chess. I used to play more but kind of gave up my favorite 5-minute blitz games after my second kid was born in 2018. Don’t miss it, TBH. 1-minute chess is sufficiently good and the game ends before it becomes boring. I have no defined time but I sometimes alternate chess with reading after everyone is in bed.

I avoid playing addictive video games. I’ve been addicted to mobile or computer games several times in my life and do not enjoy it. For example, I got addicted to the Bulgarian MMORPG Imperia Online around 2005. Woke up at 4am every night to manage my armies. This pissed off my wife so much that she gave me the talk. I stopped immediately and it was empowering, gave me the tools to interrupt emerging game addictions on demand, which I used a couple of times in the later years.

In 2011, at a company meetup, I met two of the authors of Triple Town, a highly addictive mobile game. They explained how gamification works and how the drops are optimized for producing small amounts of dopamine in your brain to hook you up. I didn’t believe at first and tried their game. Surprise, surprise. I got addicted to it and had to use my painful tooling to stop it. So, whenever I feel the need to play a new game, I try to find puzzle-like games rather than games where you collect items, merge groups of items, or raise stats.

The last game I tried to play was Puzzle Star Battle. It is very difficult, though, I couldn’t solve a single 10x10x2 puzzle.

A Sleep Trick for Computer Zombies

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

I have slept more over the last year. My average has increased from under 6 to over 7 hours, and though that’s not Nirvana, it feels better.

My morning routine is fixed. Kids go to school, and the alarm clocks go off at 7. So increasing sleep time can only be achieved by going to bed early. But how so? The former self would play games, code, and watch TV shows or YouTube. Some of these can be very addictive and I would often go to bed after 2am, setting myself up for a difficult morning that would not work without caffeine. Coffee can disrupt sleep even further.

Then I found a saying somewhere, perhaps on Reddit, source unknown:

If it’s not worth doing first thing in the morning, it’s not worth doing last thing in the evening.

Would I start the morning with the next episode of Halo? Hell no. Why am I staying late for it, shut it down. Would I read that book in the morning? What about another game of chess? You only need to overcome each of these urges once, then it’s defused by default.

The quote stuck with me and I rarely stay after 12. Feels better.