Chess Minigames for Enjoyable Learning [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Chess Minigames for Enjoyable Learning [pdf]

andytrattner.com

160 pointsandytratt64 comments

For some more chess candy, here [1] is a video of Magnus Carlsen, current world champion (and arguably the strongest player of all time), playing a bunch of exceptionally strong players in a 2.5 hour blitz (3 minutes for each side) session while also giving some exceptionally insightful commentary.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjv1-14-SuU

magnus is just magnificent

As a fellow lover of the game of Chess, and owner of several hundred Chess books, this is a great little starter book. I'm always fascinated at how Chess can completely satisfy my need for intellectual stimulation and competition, and it never gets old. It has the ultimate replay-ability factor. I fully expect to play and study the game for the rest of my life. Thank you for being delusional like me. :)

>I'm always fascinated at how Chess can completely satisfy my need for intellectual stimulation and competition, and it never gets old. It has the ultimate replay-ability factor.

I really love chess, gotten into it back in 2018 and learned a lot. Since mid 2020 I got into the bad habit of just playing 1+0 bullet games mindlessly without caring about the result just to shake off the boredom. Always repeating the same old openings and attempting the same old boring traps.

I wish I could get back to that "never gets old plus ultimate replay-ability factor", maybe I should start taking on 15+15 games back again.

I know what you mean, although my drug of choice is 3 minutes blitz. Lately I’ve gotten into letter chess on Lichess. It’s nice to be able to really analyze position and possible variations. Games last for days and weeks and you get emotionally committed to win those, or get even draw after horrible blunder.

Often you don't have or don't want to spend the uninterrupted time to play a 15+15 match, this is why bullet and blitz are so popular. For those I recommend correspondence chess (e.g. on Lichess). This form of chess is asynchronously, so whenever you have some time, like waiting for the bus, you can deeply think about a chess position of your chess game. After a game I would recommend to analyze the game and learn from your mistakes in the opening, middlegame, endgame, missed tactics and so on. These games are much more meaningful than blitz games, where you obviously might have just lost a game due to a knight fork you hadn't seen because of few seconds left on your clock.

Correspondence games will help you to understand chess more deeply, fix your own mistakes and to become an overall better player. You can also open many correspondence games in parallel, this way you don't have to wait for days until you can make another move.

I love correspondence games! I cannot cope with the anxiety of short time controls, and the satisfaction for me is always thinking deeply and feeling like I’ve made the best move I’m capable of. That said unless you’re only playing people you trust, it’s hard to dodge cheaters, even with Lichess’s cheat detection.

> it’s hard to dodge cheaters, even with Lichess’s cheat detection

You can never be 100% certain, but there's a few things one can do. Before playing an opponent in correspondence check his profile. Never play against new accounts (e.g. join date in profile < 3 months). Don't play someone who never lose games (e.g. 80 wins, 20 draws, 0 losses is suspicious unless it's Magnus). Don't play someone who only has very few games played in total. Compare the other statistics if he has a beginner level blitz rating of 1600 and rapid rating of 1700, but correspondence is GM like level of 2500+ then this is also suspicious.

Playing on the internet can be a chess killer and a mind-number. Since 2014 I have been almost purely been "wasting my time" on 3+2 and shorter blitz without much improvement. The glory days for me were 2012-2013, when I could set aside a full day and play in G45 or G60 Saturday Swiss at the Portland Chess Club.

15+15 sounds great but you can also go for 30 or 45 or 60 minute games online! Even if not in person, with those time controls at the low end of classical, you will find yourself thinking more deeply to re-wire bad habits. The mistakes will have more investment behind them, so you will tend to review the games and learn/internalize from them more. Especially if you find a good sparring partner, or set the rating range -0 +500, and only play people who are better than you. I'm on Lichess if you like: https://lichess.org/@/andytratt :)

I disagree a bit with correspondence because I think few people are wired to take it seriously. I've been doing correspondence Go and some days I just make a move because I'm busy with other things, so it really has to be a priority over a long time period. Also, I tried Diplomacy a couple times last year with various groups (https://www.backstabbr.com/) and found that it's a rare breed of human who, even in hacker demographics, can focus on such correspondence activities to my (very minimal) level.

It seems to me that chess rather exposes a common fallacy in games now a days. So many games in an effort to create "deep" systems somewhat intuitively turn to creating convoluted and complex systems of rules. But the problem is in so many cases once you understand the rules in play, it reveals the game itself to be little more than a deeply obfuscated roshambo.

By contrast with chess you can learn every single rule in about 5 minutes, and then spend the remaining 80 years of your life exploring their depths.

Complex != deep, simple != shallow.

> you can learn every single rule in about 5 minutes

That might be true for the game of Go with its much simpler rules, but for Chess I reckon it takes at least an hour for someone to absorb all rules.

add in scoring for go and it will take an hour

YES. This is the point of the book! Chess rule absorption is quite a painful, boring process for most people. It can take a very long time, especially for children and/or folks who are not intrinsically motivated but being forced to learn to indulge a family member, friend, or something.

Ideally the learning process can be both fun and high-utility, through minigames and the other activities laid out in the book! It took me 3+ weeks of multiple hour-long classes each week to get a classroom of smart 4th graders to absorb the knight movements and play Knight Battleship competently. In the end, they did enjoy it... and once they felt mastery, they wanted to learn more.

Oh, there's no choice :)

It always struck me as strange, among the many chess shelves in the Mechanics Institute and elsewhere, that there wasn't such a starter book out there already...I'm very pleased to hear it stacks up well against your hundreds!

P.S. I have another one for parents teaching kids, which is basically a simplified and expanded chapter 1 of the adult one: https://andytrattner.com/img/pdf/teach-chess.pdf

I don't understand the appeal of chess for the average player. Unless you are advanced (over 2000 elo) there is nothing really "deep" about it. It's like solving simple puzzles and you have to think like a computer, simply evaluating moves and responses. As GM Ben Finegold said, when you show a sub-2000 player what he did wrong he's not surprised; he just didn't see it, didn't calculate it.

Yes, if you reach 2000 elo the game becomes very strategic but 99% of people won't reach that due to not being able to play thousands and thousands of games and/or not doing so early enough in their life.

Can you play just for fun when you are below 2000? Yes you can but it's not much fun because in most games players will blunder and at that point the game pretty much gets decided; you can blunder at any point, you can never relax, you can never play a move and be confident that you didn't blunder. The constant struggle to be ultra-focused on your calculation quickly wears you down and makes the game tiring and stressful.

there's a lot of pleasure in mechanical exercise, it's the reason people go to the gym or play starcraft. You don't really need to be good at chess to get fun out of calculating chess moves. It's true that it's like solving puzzles, but puzzles are very popular! It's like working out for your brain. Even at the GM level by the way chess is really 99% tactics. It's not like some 4X strategy game, it's by its nature almost always concrete.

And because everyone can blunder at low level play a blunder doesn't mean you lose the game. It's with higher ELO that the game starts to become more punishing.

And you definitely can get to a good strength as an adult. 2000 is strong club level, which if you really want to do it is a few years of dedicated training. And even at your average club rating of say 1700-1800 you can play decent games.

On the one hand yes, I find chess a miserable hobby sometimes for these exact reasons. On the other hand, I think it’s been a hugely valuable life lesson and a boon to my focus and willpower. But I don’t understand how you can think chess isn’t satisfying to weaker players. An attack that comes off, even if it’s unsound, is one of the most beautiful things in gaming for me.

That is not unique to chess - at the amateur level, I think pretty much every single board game and competitive video game is decided by "blunders" - obviously sub-optimal tactics, bad "micro" in strategy games and other mistakes that are obvious to the players nearly immediately and can be trained away.

It is a matter of your own frame of mind whether that stresses you... And it is probably quite idiosyncratic to people! I get stressed out by trying and failing to optimally micromanage build orders and scouting in games like Warcraft/Age of Empires, but I am happy to go with the flow with frequent blunders in chess...

It's the same in sports too. A blunder in Tennis means you missed the ball. A blunder in Football (Soccer) means you gave possession to the other team. A blunder in Jiujitsu means you get choked out. The joy of these games don't come from not making any blunders; it's making less and less blunders each and every game. If I wrestle with someone and beat them time and time again, there's little fun in that. If I wrestle with someone and lose time and time again, that feeling of elation when I train my hardest and eventually beat them is incomparable.

Chess is a delightful game for a number of reasons. It's wonderful for all the reasons puzzles are; the sense of achievement when you solve one. That "aha!" moment, where all that calculation clicks. It's wonderful because of the competition; it's one of the few that have a system where you can accurately track your progress over time outside of major competition, ie. online chess. You can see your rank climbing day-by-day. It's wonderful because you effectively get a coach for free; modern engines can give advice on moves, tell you where you went wrong, and what was a more optimal move. That's something you'd have to pay an arm and a leg for in any other sport or game. I started learning and playing chess at the beginning of quarantine, and it's one of the most fulfilling things I've done competitively since doing sports at university.

I mean, yes you can blunder but so can your opponent. There’s some fun to a scrappy game where both players aren’t great and the advantage switches between the two constantly. If anything it’s more dull at the top level where a pawn can determine a game.

Yes you can enjoy the game below 2000 if you play people at the same level as you. When you blunder the opponent will occasionally blunder back at below 2000. I've had really enjoyable games where I got to make strategic decisions like doing an exchange sacrifice because the opponent decided to lock away his queen. Or the opponent that "Fischered" his bishop by grabbing a rook pawn and me getting use of light squares again. When both of these things happened the win wasn't clear and you needed to think more long term than just finding the right tactical sequences. But granted it isn't happening every game.

> Yes, if you reach 2000 elo the game becomes very strategic but 99% of people won't reach that

This is fine, since most beginners consider tactics to be more exciting than strategy anyways.

If appeal didn’t exist for novice or average players then nobody would be over 2000 eventually and the chess would not exist as a (popular) game.

Chess is mainly for enjoyment. It doesn't really matter what your level is because you're playing with people the same level as you.

I'm sure football isn't fun if it's played against pro's but a kick around with friends would seem fine.

You should try lichess. You lose quite a few games until the game understands your level but it's great fun.

People are definitely surprised when they blunder mate in one. But after it happens and the pieces are knocked to the floor, perhaps seeing what you did wrong and understanding it quickly is a feature of the game rather than a bug. This allows faster learning cycles, a feeling of mastery, and progress towards the 2000+ level. Don't forget the competitive dynamic too. Can you learn faster and do better over time than your opponents? This is motivating to many. I certainly enjoyed improving rapidly vs my peers in high school.

I would add that, having now reached 2000+ myself years ago, the same punishing tactical dynamics apply at master level and it's harder to continuously make progress. At some point all chess players turn to other activities, often ones that are more creative, because chess does become repetitive in the confines of the 64 squares. Of course, it's still near-infinitely variable, but the contours of games and the player's progress within them are somehow bounded. Within the last year, I've made a serious effort to switch to Go.

Chess really isn't for everyone always, and as AlphaZero shows, it may not be for any one either... us mere mortals will struggle along, occasionally indulging in puzzle brain crack, and sometimes making meaning out of the journey. In the right context, it can be enjoyable too.

The conclusion of the book states that rather than being viewed as unilaterally boring, I hope chess can be respected and appreciated by all, just like chocolate. You don't have to personally like chocolate, but that doesn't mean it's intrinsically bad, and many people do like it :)

This is true in everything competitive though. How do non-pros enjoy sports, or competitive video games, or anything. The action itself can be fun. The improvement itself can be fun.

> As GM Ben Finegold said, when you show a sub-2000 player what he did wrong he's not surprised; he just didn't see it, didn't calculate it.

I don't see why the reaction should be different between an amateur or a pro here. In either case they just didn't see, or know the existence of, the move. The only reason it may be surprising to a higher level player is because the ego has lead them to believe they should have seen it.

I disagree it's true in everything. I haven't made an exhaustive survey of everything, but I have one counterexample: competitive StarCraft at a low level is always determined by who has the best strategy, not the best execution ("micro" in the lingo.)

A really slow player who understands the strategy but can't execute many actions quickly will consistently beat a faster player that has little strategic sense but a faster trigger finger.

The reason for this is, in my amateur judgment, that the slower player with better strategic sense will manage their resources (both time, space, and in-game resources) orders of magnitude more efficiently than the happy trigger finger.

Edit: I should clarify that I'm talking about StarCraft: Brood War. I just realised there's been a sequel and I don't know if what I've said is true for it.

What a bunch of elitist nonsense.

"I can't understand the appeal of programming for the average programmer. Unless you are advanced >2% of leetcode there is nothing really "deep" about it. It's about solving simple puzzles and you have to think like a computer, simply evaluate datatype and if-conditionals."

When teaching Go, a popular mini-game is capture-Go, with the winner being the first to capture an opponent's stone. But these Chess mini-games gave me an idea for an even simpler one.

Starting from an empty board, place your stone so that it's not adjacent to any opponent stone. The first player unable to do so loses. I guess it could be called Avoid Contact.

This is first of all a good way to learn the distinction between 4-connectedness and 8-connectedness., while avoiding the intricacies of captures. But it can also teach players a bit about forming territory, since building a chain 2 steps from the edge creates a safe space for your own stones.

Now that I think about it, this is so obvious that it should already be known. If so, does anyone have a reference for it?

Thinking about it some more, this game has a big flaw. One of the players has a simple winning strategy by mirroring (actually 180 degree rotation) the other player's moves. On an n x n board, the 1st player wins if n is odd (by starting in the middle), and the 2nd player wins if n is even. Changing to a rectangular m x n board, with m+n odd, doesn't help. The 1st player still wins by playing on one of the 2 central points followed by mirroring.

While this flaw prevent Avoid Contact from being a good game in its own right, it still seems to make an excellent introduction to Go. Praised be those students that can discover the mirroring strategy by themselves. And then they will appreciate Go all the more as they learn how to defeat the mirroring strategy there...

The next chance I get to teach someone Go, it will be in this order:

Avoid Contact -> Capture Go -> Go

There are some ways to deal with the mirroring flaw. The following assume odd-sized square boards.

In one, the 1st player is forbidden from starting in the center.

The other gives the 2nd player the option of switching sides after the first stone is played.

nice

just teach them go.

AWESOME!!! YES!!!! It's all about the most simple structures.

There is a flaw in the B+R minigame, which is that perfect play leads to a draw, or rather people playing forever and getting board because they don't yet know the 50-move rule...

Although apt adults will quickly realize the optimal approach, many will still get pieces captured, so someone will win and lose, and they can play again until they realize the optimal approach. Then it's time to move on to the next minigame!

I still haven't figured out if Pawn Wars resolves to a zugzwang situation based on who moves first. And King Opposition took a while for me to grok, even though I knew how to queen a pawn. Interesting to think about all these things, even if the conclusion is predetermined.

A nice small book to introduce someone to chess, especially the minigames. I’d like more of them. I know of one, but don’t know the name of it. You start with all black pieces on their positions and then with only one white knight (whoever you want, it’s symmetrical) you try to take all the black pieces in the lowest number of moves. My niece showed me this small exercise but I can’t recall the name if it and I was unable to find it online. On my todo list, to create a simple webpage with this mini game (along with other small/easy ones) where young players do practice and also keep their scores/time on a leaderboard per game ;-)

Thanks, amazing, yes please make interactive things!! I always wanted to turn this into a site and put more of them, but my limited programming patience only led to a basic diagram generator (http://andytrattner.com/chessboard/) for the written page :(

Different configurations to hop knights around are great. I recall https://acornchess.com/ has some more of these. They didn't have cloud-based stuff nor social / leaderboards if I recall, it was all local desktop and behind paywall. The opportunity is there to create better things!

P.S. this site also has some more stuffs - https://www.chessvideos.tv/endgame-training/endgame-simulati...

To OP: I was just looking into simple chess puzzles for my son (checkmate in two etc), so this popping up on HN front page is excellent. Many thanks for your work! Would you mind also providing an epub version of it?

Apparently, there's also another booklet on your homepage, "How to Teach Your Child Chess" [1]. Will look into that one as well.

1: https://andytrattner.com/img/pdf/teach-chess.pdf

Thanks so much for the positivity and suggestion! Unfortunately, it is not a priority for me right now to make an epub.

Regarding puzzles, see tactics section. You surely have already found mountains of mate in 2 exercises somewhere... If not, https://ausee.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/23.pdf

Ha, this will surely keep us busy for a while, thanks very much for that link. Btw, I already played several of your proposed Minigames with my son (8yo), and he was instantly hooked. Nice change from the regular games he insists on playing every night before bedtime. I think both your books are really well thought out and structured. Very encouraging and helpful for amateurs like us. Thanks again!

Regarding the epub: turns out the layout of your pdfs is just fine to read on my e-reader's screen, so the epub definitely isn't crucial. I also quite like the books' clean and simple design.

This is great, it reminds me of an old Bobby Fischer book I had years ago that taught chess by studying endgames first, instead of openings, which is similar to these minigames. I like that these minigames are more focused on exploring chess, than just simulating possible endgames.

That is an interesting idea! I wonder if it would work for go too. There are fewer rules to learn, but the situations can get rather complicated too.

There's a term for go minigames in Chinese, but I don't recall it. You might enjoy this site: https://senseis.xmp.net/?ProblemsAndExercises

Tsumego is probably the term you are looking for. I have an app with lots of them on my phone.

I was talking specifically about using them to teach the rules, which is not something I've heard of so far.

As a person perpetually stuck on the ‘total beginner’ phase, I really have no idea how one would start learning chess by beginning with openings. As I imagine it, one first learns to recognize good moves three levels forward, then four and five, until full positions start making sense quicker—and ‘endgames’ are a natural fit for this, since they involve just a few pieces and lead to an unambiguous checkmate. Puzzles, like in some phone apps, work pretty well this way. But openings are a complete opposite of this.

(I mean, I understand that in any case one proceeds to learn the overall game by memorizing hundreds of openings and training to recognize patterns at once, and then by dumping full-time evenings into cranking up the rating. Which is why I decided that I'm fine with the beginner status.)

Memorizing openings is dubious at best, unless you're already a very strong player. Most chess coaches will actively discourage studying the opening until the you've become sufficiently good at the more impactful aspects of the game. Things like, awareness of the board, not hanging pieces, king safety, tactical pattern recognition, calculating 2-3 moves in advance with precision, attacking, defending, basic endgames, time management, basic strategy, and instincts. Memorization, without understanding, is mostly useless in Chess.

Give Lichess a go (mobile or website). It's got unlimited puzzles and has helped me tremendously and doesn't get monotonous

Ehh endgames can quickly go from easy, a beginner could do it, to insane theory that IMs struggle with. Mating with a Queen? Easy. Mating with a rook? Sure. Bishop knight? That’s pretty rough. Knight knight vs pawn? Even Hikaru struggles with that one in blitz.

thanks for the positive feedback! warms my heart <3 :)

This is a helpful little book, so thanks @andytratt. One thing I think you should add in future editions is an illustration for en passant. You illustrate things like the knight move but IMO en passant is harder for beginners to understand without an illustration.

Holy hell

indeed

Sorry, my bad. I didn't think to look in the minigame section for the fundamental moves and assumed they were all in the front matter.

En passant is illustrated on p. 14, in the discussion of pawn movement in the Pawn Wars minigame.

Thanks you!

Yes I intentionally buried the piece movement explanations after each minigame, trying to keep focus on the sequence of minigames and letting folks skip over the piece movements in case they already knew them a priori.

"Even though chess has been around for well over a thousand years, good introductory teaching doesn't exist. So far, nobody has survived chess baptism without scars. Are you ready to join me in making history?"

Hyperbole much? Guides, books, teachers have been around as long as chess have [1] so to suggest that none of these provide a 'good introductory teaching' is somewhat hubristic.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Ram%C3%ADrez_de_Lucena

"Hyperbole is the use of exaggeration as a rhetorical device or figure of speech. In rhetoric, it is also sometimes known as auxesis. In poetry and oratory, it emphasizes, evokes strong feelings, and creates strong impressions. As a figure of speech, it is usually not meant to be taken literally." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole)

Yes, absolutely correct, I used hyperbole :)

I kind of want to truncate my response to the above. I will respond in more detail, not to be defensive, but because perhaps there is a misunderstanding that can be rectified here. This expressive passage was not meant to convey hubris.

I genuinely have yet to find a text which comprehensively introduces the game in a fun way, as mine does. You will see in other comments that folks often have chess sets lying around, but they struggle to engage those around them or teach the game engagingly. The tone of that paragraph is born from a very real, very modern, and very frustrating experience.

Most books that "teach" chess are things like My System, which presumes some familiarity with the game and its rules, and is also just super dry. Josh Waitzkin's Attacking Chess was great as an intro to tactics, but not to the piece movements or chess itself as a whole. There are no other resources I have seen which effectively employ minigames, except perhaps IM Herman Grooten's recommended "Steps Method" (https://www.stappenmethode.nl/en/). After speaking with IM Grooten, I decided that their approach, while great for the classroom and extremely comprehensive, is not encapsulated in a form that non-chess instructors would find worth paging through and implementing in their lives or with their loved ones.

As an aside, I think Lucena's book was written so long ago that some of the rules (pawn double-step, en passant, long-range queen movement, castling) may not have been the same. I haven't read it, and I don't know anyone who has, so I can't say for sure. Wikipedia hints at this.

I really can't say where the counterexample is, because I haven't found good introductory teaching. Lichess has great learning modules, which can take someone from zero knowledge to decent player in a great engaging way. But that's not well-explained to a parent or beginner who isn't quite self-motivated to dig through hardcore chess stuff on their own.

For those in the autodidact demographic, my book is irrelevant for sure, and perhaps that includes you. Other resources those folks might find more useful (the kind who want lists of source material instead of some hubristic author opining) I have listed here: https://andytrattner.com/chess

A year or two ago I bought my nephew a chess board/game and since then I've been struggling figuring out how I can teach him the game effectively. He seems to prefer playing on ipad/phone because he can see the legal moves.

I'm going to use these mini games the next time we play to help him learn the piece movements a litle better. This is great!

yay!

I’ve been trying to teach my 5 yo kid to play chess. He’s very enthusiastic but there seems to be so many things to learn so he sometimes feels overwhelmed. Today I’m going to test some of the minigames in the book! Very nice, thanks for the author :)

Yay! Good luck, hope it works out! If the enthusiasm can be channeled, then that's great. The minigames should keep him from getting overwhelmed. But 5 can be hard sometimes, and if focus isn't there yet, just wait a bit and try at 6 :) Thanks for commenting, makes me smile!

This is awesome. Mini games are easy fun and very quick, and a great way to start chess!