Hello: I began the Burleigh Chess Club about a year ago in Brookfield WI. We meet every Friday morning before school for 70 minutes. I currently have just over a hundred students, approx 60 new to chess and I am OK. I have 35 that are more experienced and a dozen or so that have caught up to their teacher (Me). I have a great group of parent volunteers to help keep the club running smooth but comparable to my own skill level. Any ideas to take these players with more potential than me to the next level? Do I need to improve my own skills or to bring in local players to help, or am I missing the obvious?
Thanks
Get your better students to play in open (not just scholastic) OTB tournaments.
Bill Smythe
I am using their tournament experiences as a benchmark, that they are not at the level they could be. Is it the repeated exposure to this caliber player that will help guide them? My concern is after each match I am hard pressed to teach what they could have done better.
Thanks
If your students are mature and well mannered, most adult tournament players will go over the games with them (in my area at least). I’ve seen coaches of the 800-1000 level go over games with their 1200+ students with CB light using fritz as well to point out obvious mistakes (going from 0.12 to -8 in one move!)
My coach in High school was probably rated about 500. I got to about a 1100 strength under his tutelage and encouragement. Playing against better opponents helps a lot. I have heard that the chess magnet program online is pretty good too and less than $30 for a year?
Sounds like you’re doing a great job, congratulations! It’s especially encouraging that you have parents involved as well.
Here’s what you’re uniquely qualified to provide them:
(1) Trust and friendship
(2) Information on tournaments to build their skills
(3) Access to a list of potential coaches / mentors in the area beyond your skill level
(4) Access to learning materials
(5) Recommendations / info on local clubs
Some would say that anybody could provide 2-5 above, but that’s why #1 is so important. Because you care, the kids and parents can trust that you did some homework and aren’t suggesting some homeless guy to teach their kid the Ruy Lopez. Get them in the mix with some patient older players at a club…the results will fascinate you.
I’ll never forget a brutal lesson that an old man gave me on knight forks when I was 15yrs old (family fork…king, queen, both rooks, and a bishop). He never forked me again…and 1 year later I was obliterating him in tournaments. But it’s not really about that, it’s that he actually wanted to play timed games with me to help me get better. In our adult years he has been a great friend and mentor, and I wish he’d be around longer.
You’ve got enough kids in your group that you can start breaking them into groups, and that’s exactly what you need to do.
You’ve also got enough kids who are strong players that you can hire in another instructor who’s a better player than you are.
You could recruit someone at a local open OTB tournament, or ask around at a tournament to see if you can find out which players in your area are chess teachers.
The per-hour charge might be fairly high, but one good instructor can lead a sizeable class, and spend some time going over individuals’ games. By providing all sorts of volunteer support, you allow your hired instructor to focus on chess, and get maximum value for your buck.
It sounds to me like you’re an excellent scholastic club organizer, and you can continue to organize the club, teach the lower players, coordinate the volunteers, and keep watch over/evaluate the program and whatever instructors you may hire.
I agree with those who recommend getting the good players mixed into the local “all-ages” chess scene, whether it’s clubs or tournaments. Most adult players are very good about going over games with younger (or lesser) players. However, if these kids are spending time in a scholastic club, they should be getting something out of it that’s at their level.
Keep up the good work!
A 5-way family fork is really no more devastating than a regular 2-way fork. Either way, you drop only one piece. 
Bill Smythe
Try the Internet.
There are a number of sites where information and instruction are available. Some of these are paid sites, but some are free sites, and some are a mix where some stuff is free while payment is required for the more advance material.
The sites that come to mind are Gameknot.com [free puzzles], Chessworld.net [see the “Play Better” section], Chesscube.com, chessvideos.tv, chesstactics.org, chesscountry.com [free reviews, articles, and instructional material posted very irregularly. links to blog by IM Andrew Martin and a blog by National Master Brian Wall], and Chess.com [many sections].
Also, check your local libraries (& interlibrary loan system) for chess books that may help your various students.
Hope this helps.
-Larry S. Cohen
I think you are!
Can you imagine someone suggesting that Bob Bowman can’t really coach Michael Phelps because Bob can’t swim as fast as Michael? It’s only in chess that you’d hear something like that!
The thing to remember is that the key to good coaching isn’t knowing how to play well, but knowing how a player can improve their play. Can you help them identify their weaknesses? Can you help them develop plans for overcoming those weaknesses? If so, then you can be a good coach, regardless of whether you can play as well as they can.
Of course, one of the best ways to find out whether your improvement strategies work is to use them yourself. I used to coach a chess team, and I had a list of training rules I’d give the kids every year. I sometimes suspected that I was the only one who actually followed them. But because I did, I knew that they worked, because following them made my own play improve.
If they have recorded their games, get a chess computer with a good rating and play the games on it. Chess computers are very good at spotting situations where you can do a clever piece exchange and gain an advantage.
Thank you all for your ideas and encouragement 
We are currently broken into four groups based on skill level and with all games being recorded I am able to line up skill levels within those groups fairly well in the first round. After that winner vs winner is what we attempt. We loose some alignment due to time constraints not wanting the players to be idle until their ideal opponent is ready.
I would be interested in hearing more about the set of rules or guidelines that was mentioned? We have a few that we talk about but we have not been that structured in practice.
Again I thank everyone for their comments.
Download Winboard which comes with free engines rated at master strength (GNU and Crafty). It’s just as good as anything else for what you’re looking for.
I got involved in helping a boyhood friend who became a successful chess teacher for many of the same reasons that you are discussing here, and if it’s permissible for me to discuss my online instructional support service here, I’d like to join the discussion.
It seems to me that many people of widely varying chess skill and teaching ability are all doing their utmost to help others learn to play and love chess. And at the same time, some people are developing effective approaches to teaching, and making them available in one form or another. What I’ve tried to help with in working with one such teacher is to be able to provide support to the former class of people, in the form of online learning exercises developed by a successful educator.
I would appreciate any feedback on our approach, which is explained and which is available for trial use at chessmagnetschool.com. The About Us link explains the experience and background of the educator, and of those of us who have been working to help make his methods available to those of you who are not yourselves subject matter experts to the extent your students might need.
In the end, both good support and good leadership both seem essential to me. Our goal is to enable anyone who wants to help others learn the game.
PS - Please also take note of the completely free program that we developed in concert with USCF, which can be found via the New to Chess? link on USCF’s home page, as well as under the Learn the Rules link on my own web site.
I could probably answer that question with “Yes.” and be on the mark. :chuckle:
You could bring in local players to help teach them. You could study and improve your own skills and thus impart the new skills to the kids. Or you could do your best to provide them with the environment and tools to raise their own level. Probably the most effective way is the last one, the quickest and most efficient is the first.
People improve all the time on their own, through dedicated study of books and games, with a continual testing against each other as they improve. The Two Rivers NHS Championship team from the '70’s did precisely that. “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” As the group improves, they’ll share their gains with each other, and everyone will rise.
You need to make sure they have access to materials, and encourage them. GM Baburin once told me that for scholastic and club players it doesn’t matter what you study so much as that you study. Do the whole book, not just pieces of it.
I’m just up the road a piece from you guys (up by Noyes Park) so if you like, drop me an email with more specific questions, and I’ll do what I can to answer them.
From nystar.com/chesscenter/hsstory.htm
Cleveland, OH 1976: The 8th Annual National High School Championship ventured again from the familiar McAlpin Hotel in New York City, this time to Cleveland, Ohio. Over 512 participated this time, including 5 Masters. Despite the record strength of the tournament, it was 11th-rated Richard Kaner (2052) of Two Rivers, WI who finished clear first with 7.5-.5 to win the 255-player Championship Section. This event would be characterized as the “Tournament of Upsets.” It was the first time that one of the 7 top-rated players had failed to win the title. Top-rated Mike Rohde (2343), 1974 High School Champion, fell victim to Kaner in a decisive game in Round 6. Earlier, defending champion John Fedorowicz suffered the upset of the tournament when he lost to Joseph Fang (1863) of MA. With 2 rounds remaining, the 10 top-rated players were all but eliminated. Iowa’s Walter Morris (2077) could do no more than draw against tournament pace-setter Kaner in their last-round game, ceding first to the latter. Rohde won his final two games to place 2nd with 7-1, the only one of the 6 top-rated players to score more than 6 points. Also scoring 7-1 were 3rd-place Greg Small (1965) of FL and 4th-place Jake Meskin (1974) of NY.
The team competition produced another remarkable result. The competition was so close that the winning score was 2.5 less than 1975 and the lowest ever for the National High School. In the last round, the five contenders for first, as if suddenly opposed to the prospect of being national champions, all turned in minus scores, not one scoring more than 1.5 points that round! Thanks to a clutch performance by its 11th-ranked player (Greg Wunsch, 1110), Washington High School, the 12-player contingent from Two Rivers, WI, deadlocked with defending champions University High of Los Angeles at 21.5 points each, but squeaked to victory with 4 extra tiebreak points. South HS of Great Neck, NY displayed no such aversion to winning in the last round, and swept 4-0 to finish in a surprising 3rd with 21 points, just ahead of the higher-rated Stuyvesant (NYC) and Boston Latin. Washington High of Two Rivers, Wisconsin, despite its relatively isolated location (90 miles north of Milwaukee) in a city of just 13,700, becomes the first school to win both the national individual and team high school championships.
To put it further into perspective, the closest larger concentration of people to Two Rivers is the thriving metropolis of Manitowoc (pop 33,000 – that’s what made Picket Fences so funny to us; it claimed to show off small-town life in WI using a fictitious city – Rome, WI – of 30,000 people when a city that size here would almost make the top 10 for population centers).
And, to tie the whole story back into the retention issues, only one of the top four players (Jon Breider) is still active in WI chess circles. I’ve spoken with him often about those years, and it wasn’t a case of a strong coach, or higher-rated players giving lessons. It was simply a case of 4-5 kids who loved to play chess, constantly playing against each other, studying, and helping each other improve, either directly by passing on information, or indirectly by demonstrating improved technique to each other over the board in competition.
Thanks for posting the official story, Steve. We’ve always been inordinately proud of those kids.