Monday, October 3, 2011

Teaching Chess To Kids!

It took me some time but finally I have made up my mind over the weekend while attending US National G/60 and G/30 tournaments. I will teach chess to Ahyan and any other kid who wants to learn and play chess. So if you want your son or daughter to learn chess, then please feel free to contact me. You may forward this email to your friends who you think might get interested. Teaching one kid and one dozen kids are almost same amount of time involvement from my side.

Because chess is my passion and not profession, I won't charge any money. My return will be a bunch of kids who play chess in many bay area tournaments in near future. If you have ever worked on a volunteer organization, you will know what this means!

I want to start it immediately before I loose my drive to teach chess. I know once I start, I will continue it for a good amount of time, at least next few years. But if I don't start now, I will never get to the point to start it again.

Regarding the logistics, let's start once a week in my house. I have got proposals to host it in my friend's houses in rotation as well and we will evaluate that option. But for now, let's gather together every evening in my house.

Depending on the level of students, I will batch them in 2 different groups. One who doesn't know chess at all and want to learn from the scratch (I guess most of them will be like that including my son Ahyan). I guess there will be a few (I know a couple of them) who already knows chess at basic level and want to advance a bit so that they can play in the tournaments competitively. I guess the first batch will catch up with these guys in 6 months or so. I will spend one hour (or more) with the regular kids and some extra time with the couple of advanced kids that I am expecting.

Regarding timing, I would prefer Thursday evening. So let's start from next week's Thursday at my house. We may use Saturday night in case I get busy in office in a particular Thursday but in general, I will leave the weekend free to go out of town for traveling and let you do the same. I will use demonstration board, chess sets and laptop computer but I expect every kid's parents will arrange one standard chess set and will have access to internet at home. I plan to use this chess blog for home work (if any). It's okay if the parents want to stay with the kids during the session or want to leave them and finish some shopping.

If you are interested, then please reply me to this email with your phone number, your son and daughter's name and age and if he/she already knows the move at ashikuzzaman@gmail.com . I plan to start at 13th October (Thursday) 7 PM at my Fremont house.

Update: I already started teaching chess to 6 kids since 13th October. The very first session I showed them the famous Opera Game by Paul Morphy to use it as a frame of reference for my next sessions. I used chess demonstration board and the kids looked interested. Let's see how the next few sessions go.

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