Keep in mind I'm really, really, really far from a "complete beginner" in many ways. I already understand the rules of chess. I've played maybe 50 games of chess in my life, although I've lost nearly every one. I'm a teacher by profession and spend almost all my waking hours thinking about how people learn and implementing that in curriculum. I have a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, which means I've been trained academically to think abstractly and reason about formal systems (e.g., chess).
All this, and I was still incredibly confused bordering on frustrated! Now imagine someone who was really a complete beginner and doesn't have the ability to stop what they're doing and think, "Wait, maybe I should be thinking about this a different way. Let me look up some other information and see if I can relate it to what is happening in front of me." Plenty of students in that situation would instead think, "This is impossible. I can't even guess correctly. I'm terrible at chess."
I'd strongly encourage introducing some broad, strategic distinctions between the various pieces, e.g., long range vs. short range. Whatever is important -- I'm the beginner so I have no idea!
I'd also give better examples. You don't need to do anything complicated.
You want to illustrate "pinning." There are two components to this: the movement of a piece which created a "pinned" situation and the "pinned" situation itself. A novice chess player is told there is a pin, which means they'll look for pieces to move to create a pinning situation. A more expert chess player does the opposite: they evaluate the state of the board and realize that there is a possibility to pin.
So, the goal is really to help novices become better at seeing when it's possible to pin a piece. Imagine a picture like this (I'm going to describe it in words)...
You have a chess board with some "pinnable" situation. Let's take the one from the exercise which involves moving the bishop from f1 to b5. The picture would have the bishop in the b5 position. There would be an arrow emanating from the bishop at b5, going through the knight on c6, and ending at the king on e8. You'd somehow want to label each of the three points. Maybe put a tiny colored dot in each (R,G,B) or the like.
This is meant to represent the state of "bishop b5 pins knight c6 to king e8."
Then have a translucent bishop in f1 with a dotted border. There'd be an arrow with a dotted line pointing from the ghost bishop at f1 to the bishop in b5. This is meant to represent the movement of the bishop from f1 to b5.
Then, next to this image, you would list a bunch of statement which are true about this picture, interweaving chess jargon:
"The <red>bishop</red> pins the <green>knight</green> to the <blue>king</blue>."
"<red>b5 bishop</red> pins <green>c6 knight</green> to <blue>e8 king</blue>."
"Moving the bishop from f1 to b5 pinned c6 knight to e8 king."
"The e8 king is pinned by the c6 knight."
"The c6 knight is pinned to the e8 king."
etc. Just list out phrases and relate them to the image. Modify the image to emphasize the relationship in multiple ways (e.g., coloring the text to match the colors of the appropriate pieces you marked the board with).
Something like this would give me an opportunity to see pinning from every which angle. If one angle was easier for me to understand than the other, that'd be my "entrance point" and I'd then come to understand all the other angles by relating them to the one I really understand.
Also, keep in my that the above suggestions are coming from someone who knows almost nothing about chess. They may or may not be confusing to other novices in ways that I can't see. For example, they might introduce bad habits or ideas that I haven't considered because (as a beginner) I couldn't possibly anticipate them.
Thanks! That's an invaluable addition to the conversation.
For my purposes and for the purposes of the people building this site, I was taking "complete beginner" to mean "never played chess, ever." If you think about it there are many things I know that such a person doesn't, e.g., what it's like to make an ill-considered move.
I knew what pinning and skewering were, for example, although I didn't have a name for them. Learning about pinning for me is putting a name to something I've experienced. A "complete beginner" doesn't have access to that and will be incrementally harder to teach.
That's what I meant, not that 50 games is substantial experience or that I am not a beginner.
As an aside: it's not good to think of chess as something that you "reason through" or that benefits from any kind of abstract thinking. This is a very common misunderstanding (that, as a programmer who sucks at chess, I find grating sometimes -- everyone assumes I'll be able to just sit down at a chessboard for the first time in a year and trounce them).
Instead, chess is a learned skill, like playing an instrument or maybe speaking a language. It's not that advanced chess players are unusually good at analyzing systems -- the game of chess is far too complex for that. Instead, they build up an intuitive understanding of how the game works based on memory. A good chess player looks at a board and intuitively determines which player is in a better position. This is possible because they have seen that situation, or others like it, before.
That's not to say talent doesn't play a part, but chess-playing ability is mainly a function of games played (at least, at beginner-intermediate-advanced levels).
For what it's worth, I speak three languages (English, Japanese, and German) and play three instruments (trumpet, mandolin, and guitar). :)
I don't know what a "learned skill" is, because to me both programming and mathematics are learned skills. What I hear you saying is, "You can't play chess well by thinking like a programmer." That I agree with, for sure! I can't learn to program well by thinking like a mathematician, either.
That said, whether experts can express them consciously or not, there's a set of rules and heuristics by which they're making decisions. They might be incomplete, inconsistent, or highly fit to the circumstances (e.g., when I see this pattern on the board my reflex is to do X, but I don't know why), but they're still there. They might use metaphors and justifications that are foreign to a programmer, but they're still there.
For example, surely some people get better at chess more quickly than others. That is, two players with the same prior chess-playing experience both play N games. One player will probably "learn more" about chess than the other.
Why? Is it just because one player is "smarter" or has a "better intuition?" Because they're better at spotting and internalizing patterns? What does that mean? What is the faster learner doing that the slower learner isn't?
To me "intuition" is just a habit we've internalized so deeply it's hard to express in words. I'm not sure what the right level of abstraction or the right metaphors for thinking about chess are, but I imagine thinking about it in terms of territory, optionality, exposure, momentum, etc. are the most useful. I could be wrong.
My point was more that whatever a good frame of mind is, it's more effective to focus on the frame of mind and train beginners to adopt the habits of that frame of mind explicitly than it is to teach them through a million isolated examples and trust that they'll learn the most appropriate generalizations.
To take pinning, for example, we might start by talking about short-range and long-range tactics. Here's my rough draft of an explanation. Keep in mind I know virtually nothing about chess and my suggestions about what to practice might be actively developing bad habits! Hopefully you get the idea, though.
Sometimes you want to be able to influence your opponent from a distance so that your pieces are less exposed. The queen, rook, and bishop are the three pieces capable of doing this because they can move an unlimited number of spaces in at least one direction. The other pieces are limited in their movement and therefore can't exert control from a distance.
Pinning is one example of a long range tactic where one of our long-range pieces threatens a low-value piece, but the opponent can't move it without exposing a higher-value piece. For example, your bishop might be lined up to attack the opponent's queen, but one of the opponent's knights is blocking the way. In this situation your opponent can't move their knight without opening up their queen to attack. We'd say that the "bishop is pinning the knight to the queen" or "the knight is pinned to the queen by the bishop."
As a beginner it will take time to internalize all the moving parts of pinning. Remembering which pieces are worth more and recalling that without thinking takes time. Seeing patterns on the board without "manually" going through each possibility will take time. Go easy on yourself and take it slow. Don't get frustrated when you miss a chance to pin a piece. You'll develop good habits over time if you're deliberate in your approach.
To start, here's a board. Look for high value pieces and see if they're exposed in any of the directions that would be open to attack by a queen, rook, or bishop if those pieces were placed appropriately. Also look at your queen, rooks, and bishops to see where they can move. Are they able to move in a place that threatens any high-value pieces if there were no other pieces on the board?
These are your potential opportunities for pinning.
If you practice this over and over it'll become a habit and will stop feeling like "manual labor."
Take a look at this board and go through the process above. Is there some piece you can move which will pin an opponent's knight to their king? Are there any other opportunities to pin on the board? You can only make one move: if you had to choose between the various opportunities to pin, which would you choose and why? Can you see any advantages or disadvantages between the opportunities you have to pin an opponent's piece?
It's ok if you can't or if you think your reasons are no good. Give your best effort and keep in mind that your reasons might not be good reasons or the reasons an expert would give. You'll develop instincts for how to evaluate multiple possible moves as time goes on.
Keep in mind I'm really, really, really far from a "complete beginner" in many ways. I already understand the rules of chess. I've played maybe 50 games of chess in my life, although I've lost nearly every one. I'm a teacher by profession and spend almost all my waking hours thinking about how people learn and implementing that in curriculum. I have a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, which means I've been trained academically to think abstractly and reason about formal systems (e.g., chess).
All this, and I was still incredibly confused bordering on frustrated! Now imagine someone who was really a complete beginner and doesn't have the ability to stop what they're doing and think, "Wait, maybe I should be thinking about this a different way. Let me look up some other information and see if I can relate it to what is happening in front of me." Plenty of students in that situation would instead think, "This is impossible. I can't even guess correctly. I'm terrible at chess."
I'd strongly encourage introducing some broad, strategic distinctions between the various pieces, e.g., long range vs. short range. Whatever is important -- I'm the beginner so I have no idea!
I'd also give better examples. You don't need to do anything complicated.
You want to illustrate "pinning." There are two components to this: the movement of a piece which created a "pinned" situation and the "pinned" situation itself. A novice chess player is told there is a pin, which means they'll look for pieces to move to create a pinning situation. A more expert chess player does the opposite: they evaluate the state of the board and realize that there is a possibility to pin.
So, the goal is really to help novices become better at seeing when it's possible to pin a piece. Imagine a picture like this (I'm going to describe it in words)...
You have a chess board with some "pinnable" situation. Let's take the one from the exercise which involves moving the bishop from f1 to b5. The picture would have the bishop in the b5 position. There would be an arrow emanating from the bishop at b5, going through the knight on c6, and ending at the king on e8. You'd somehow want to label each of the three points. Maybe put a tiny colored dot in each (R,G,B) or the like.
This is meant to represent the state of "bishop b5 pins knight c6 to king e8."
Then have a translucent bishop in f1 with a dotted border. There'd be an arrow with a dotted line pointing from the ghost bishop at f1 to the bishop in b5. This is meant to represent the movement of the bishop from f1 to b5.
Then, next to this image, you would list a bunch of statement which are true about this picture, interweaving chess jargon:
"The <red>bishop</red> pins the <green>knight</green> to the <blue>king</blue>."
"<red>b5 bishop</red> pins <green>c6 knight</green> to <blue>e8 king</blue>."
"Moving the bishop from f1 to b5 pinned c6 knight to e8 king."
"The e8 king is pinned by the c6 knight."
"The c6 knight is pinned to the e8 king."
etc. Just list out phrases and relate them to the image. Modify the image to emphasize the relationship in multiple ways (e.g., coloring the text to match the colors of the appropriate pieces you marked the board with).
Something like this would give me an opportunity to see pinning from every which angle. If one angle was easier for me to understand than the other, that'd be my "entrance point" and I'd then come to understand all the other angles by relating them to the one I really understand.
Also, keep in my that the above suggestions are coming from someone who knows almost nothing about chess. They may or may not be confusing to other novices in ways that I can't see. For example, they might introduce bad habits or ideas that I haven't considered because (as a beginner) I couldn't possibly anticipate them.