Comment by gunian
1 day ago
Chess is such an interesting game wish more poor children had access resources to learn it without sthe stressors of poverty
1 day ago
Chess is such an interesting game wish more poor children had access resources to learn it without sthe stressors of poverty
https://lichess.org is an excellent open source chess server with plenty of learning resources for pure beginners.
As you progress learning resources sadly get more and more expensive indeed. Not to mention the cost of tournaments (travel and accomodation expenses add up very quickly).
For me as a hobbyist it's so hard to know what to learn and even to know what level the teacher should be.
I'm at 1200 in lichess, tried for example multiple ,,beginner friendly'' openings, like London / Kings Indian defense, but I realized that as four knights opening is the most natural for me, I should focus on the Italian, which is the closest to my natural style of play.
Also there are tactics practice, books, videos, but I get discourage when I see how fast some people are advancing (especially as I'm in my 40s).
The biggest thing is to not focus too much on openings. Past 4 or so moves everything can be mixed up and tactics are more important.
You're at the level where you're probably not hanging all your pieces or hanging mate-in-one too commonly. So learn endgames. You can win/draw like 75% of the time from even being down a piece or two at your level if you can play the endgame quickly and accurately.
Then, refine the middlegame, learning how to get the advantage. Doing puzzles for dozens of hours will teach you how to recognize a lot of basic tactics that can win early.
But only once you've scraped the barrel with the middlegame would I start focusing strongly on openings.
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I didn't mean me I am one of the privileged kids after all I am posting on HN :) just musing out loud digitally about all the people that dont't have access to that for various reasons or the time to devote to it but such is the way of the world
Of all the games, chess is a pretty well-distributed one. Maybe not quite as cheap to set up as football, but it's pretty close. You can create a board and pieces out of two sheets of paper and a pen.
Learning it is tougher of course!
I am curious why you connected this to child poverty.
Are there things that you wish poor children had less of, with more stressors from poverty?
presumably it's because the stressors of poverty forces one to think in the short-term, while Chess incentivizes long-term strategy.
If you learn not to take a pawn because 5 moves later you'll lose a bishop, maybe you won't take on credit card debt when 5 months later you owe 10% more in interest.
lol credit cards that's a million privilege steps ahead most children in the world do not have two hours to spend on their own education much less chess they work etc