The internet. Where six year olds can challenge someone from anywhere in the world to a game of chess 🙂 A welcome tool to someone who is trying to teach a 6yo and a 4yo how to play chess. It’s not too annoying to teach a noob how to play, but it always leads to another game with another noob, or two noobs playing incorrectly together until there are pieces all over the floor – like when the 4yo wants to just turn the board on its side and to play ‘chess elevator’ where the pieces fall down the hollow center of the board where the pieces are typically stored.
Wanna sit with me while I play with my friend from the inter….well…
I have a long time chess nemesis online. He’s from South Africa and I have never met him. But he’s on my facebook and is a unicyclist. I’ve ‘known him’ for a long long time from the unicycle world, but I still don’t really actually ‘know him’ at all or have ever met him. (Just a quick little lesson/reminder on who people are on the internet…)
I told the 6yo I could challenge my friend and give an ongoing step by step narration of what’s going on in the game…what I am thinking and planning to do, and what the opponent might be thinking, pointing out some possible future strategies.
It took two moves of my game before he wanted to play his own game so I typed up a game called ‘Challenge from a six year old chess novice’ and the challenge was accepted within the hour.
All of a sudden this is a way more fun way to teach chess (a move here and there instead of a physical probably-to-be-unfinished-game-at-a-time is a big plus…and the cleanup is a lot quicker, too)
The website we are on is called Gameknot.com and my username is unicyclebrian (I had an inactive account for years so I just had to make a new one)
Dang. While typing this, he just moved his queen to the worst place possible…next to an opposing rook and unprotected 🙂
