Small Difference

After discovering the usefulness of Bruce Pandolfini's Beginning Chess (1993), I incorporated elementary tactics with ten or fewer pieces into my school chess programs. Beginning Chess opens with a chapter written to take a player who does not know how to move the pieces to the point where he or she is familiar with pins, forks, overloading, and other basic tactical motifs. The text then offers thirty sets of ten problems each. The problems have a maximum of ten pieces on the board.

I highly recommend this book to beginning players.

Not able to purchase a copy of Pandolfini's book for each of the more than fifty chess players that I coach, I composed problems and arranged them into eighteen sets. The first four sets had six problems each, then I increased the count to nine. Each set was created on a single sheet of paper for photocopying purposes. I employed Pandolfini's idea of limiting each problem to ten pieces.

For one of my individual lessons this afternoon, I am reviewing these problem sets. My young student has been playing chess less than two months. He earned my Pawn Award two weeks ago, but is finding the Knight Award problems difficult. He needs easier problems.

He will likely have difficulty with these two from Beginning Tactics Six, although we also will not get that far today.

White to move

White to move