At our Sheung Wan location seven students invested 4 hours of their vacation, 2 hours on Monday and 2 hours on Tuesday, to participate in our holiday-break chess clinic.

We looked at various ideas behind openings (open, closed, semi-open/closed, flank) focusing on the French Advance variation; an instructive semi-open opening to become familiar with occupation of center space and attacking the center from the flank.

 

 

After a brief exploration of king pawn endgames and associated critical squares we further discussed some of the greatest chess players like Philidor and the World Champions Steinitz, Lasker and Carlson and what they brought to chess. In between each topic we played 5 minutes blitz chess.

 

 

 

After some exercises around the Pin we played a 10 minutes blitz team match of blind chess: Gauri, Mei Jing, Ray and Adrien in one corner of the room were only allowed to look at and move their own black pieces while Horatio, Ian and Miguel Angel in another corner of the room could only see and move their white pieces. They needed to cooperate as a team and two cheats were allowed … 20 moves later, after time was up for the black team, in a very equal position, the match was completed with all pieces on the board.

 

 

It was fun