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WHITE BELT - IDENTIFYING


So you're ready to learn chess. Awesome! Learning this ancient game is really quite easy if you approach it as we do in The Knight School, by tricks on the chessboard. These tricks are called tactics, and our students in The Knight School are trained very hard to perform these during their chess games. That's the core of the reason our teams are 51-0 against our competitors. 

But before I introduce you to each tactic, first let's just get familiar with the pieces. Check them out!



So how would the pieces move in a real game? Like this. Note the knight has eight legal moves, shown in purple, all of which have the knight moving in an L shape. The bishop moves diagonally as far as it wants, as shown in the yellow, until impeded by its own piece or an opponent's piece. On the chessboard below, the black dots represent all the possible legal moves each piece may opt to move to were this a real game. The rook's possible choices are illustrated in red; since rooks move as far as they choose horizontally or vertically, they are very potent blunt instruments! The queen is basically a combo of the bishop and the rook, and so she can move to many places each move, hence her high value (9 points). The king can only move one space per square, as seen in blue, and kings may not move into check. That means a king cannot move onto a square controlled by the opponent. That leaves the pawn, which is the only piece that can only move forward, never backwards. Pawns move either one space vertically, or on the first move it makes each of your pawns may opt to move two spaces vertically, as depicted in green below. Pawns, however, are the only piece that captures differently than how it moves. Pawns capture one space diagonally, as seen below when the white pawn captures the black bishop.



By far the best way to learn how each piece moves is to practice with your child or by using the credentials sent by us to you upon your enrollment to play chess against our buddy the Stockfish chess computer. He is fantastic, but watch out! Start on level one: if you click a higher level you will probably get smeared! We suggest that right this sec you go to www.lichess.org and sign in with the credentials we sent you and play. If you lost the creds, no worries; just email us and we will send those creds right over so you can get started practicing!

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