Jim West On Chess: In Chess "Those Who Can" Teach

Monday, June 4, 2007

In Chess "Those Who Can" Teach

As my chess student 12-year-old Ziping Liu continues to improve, having gained more than 800 rating points in less than a year, there has been some lively conversation regarding chess teaching that has caught my attention.

Yesterday, in The New York Times , Dylan McClain wrote a chess column on the topic.

Then, Michael Goeller of The Kenilworthian contributed to the discussion.

Meanwhile, at the Chess.com website, Steve Stoyko's chess exercise has been mentioned.

Personally I try to teach my student the same discipline that I taught myself in becoming a chess master: play a lot of games, study those games especially the losses, and play some more games until you get it right.

"My study of chess was accompanied by a strong attraction to music, and it was probably thanks to this that from childhood I became accustomed to thinking of chess as an art, and have never regarded it as anything else, for all the science and sport involved in it. And, moreover, an art which in some ways is closer to music than it is customary to think. Perhaps chess and music are drawn together by laws of harmony and beauty which are difficult to formulate and difficult to grasp, or perhaps by something else." - Vasily Smyslov