Chess Puzzles help train the brain to spot opportunities for your army to attack the enemy, as well as identifying the same sort of attacking threats from your opponent, against your army.
Tactics Puzzles train you to identify short-term opportunities for attacking and capturing enemy material. Naturally, you’ll need to be aware of specific types of Chess Tactics, such as Pins, Forks, Skewers, and Discovered Attacks.
A good chess tutorial website should help you to learn the different Chess Tactics. Alternatively, if you want to study tactics from a book, Yasser Seirawan’s Winning Chess Tactics comes highly recommended.
Checkmate Puzzles give you another type of test – they help train you to spot opportunities to Checkmate the enemy King, which is the ultimate goal of every game of Chess you’ll play.
If you’ve never attempted a Chess Puzzle before, they can seem a bit of a mystery… “What on earth are we supposed to do with them?”… “How do they work?” etc. etc.
Before we can get stuck in, there are things we need to know, if we’re to stand any chance of solving the multitude of Chess Puzzles…
1) We Must Recognize The Pieces And Know How They Move
While you’re not attempting a full game, you still need be able to identify the Pawns and the five different Pieces (Knights, Bishops, Rooks, Queens, and Kings). Also, be aware that not all of these units will be present at the same time, in the Puzzles you attempt.
In addition to recognizing the Pawns and Pieces, we must also know their individual patterns of movement, as this will help us analyze any given position – in the Puzzle(s) – and determine which may be the candidate(s) for the move(s) that we think solve the Puzzle.
2) We Must Understand Algebraic Chess Notation
In Chess, moves, captures and other actions are recorded using the ‘Algebraic Chess Notation’ system. If you’re unsure about what this is, a brief overview should help you on your way…
The Chessboard is split up into 64 squares, with each square being given a unique identifier, or reference – in case you’re wondering, it works in a similar way to the grid-reference system you get on printed maps.
Here’s how the squares are referenced on a chessboard:
|a8|b8|c8|d8|e8|f8|g8|h8|
|a7|b7|c7|d7|e7|f7|g7|h7|
|a6|b6|c6|d6|e6|f6|g6|h6|
|a5|b5|c5|d5|e5|f5|g5|h5|
|a4|b4|c4|d4|e4|f4|g4|h4|
|a3|b3|c3|d3|e3|f3|g3|h3|
|a2|b2|c2|d2|e2|f2|g2|h2|
|a1|b1|c1|d1|e1|f1|g1|h1|
Next, we have to learn the unique identifiers for the Pawns and Pieces, as these help us to record what Pawn or Piece moved to which square:
N = kNight
B = Bishop
R = Rook
Q = Queen
K = King
Based on what we’ve learnt so far, if we were to say that a Bishop moved to the ‘f5′ square, we’d record the move as ‘Bf5′.
By the way, Pawns don’t get any capital letter; the only way to recognize that a Pawn has moved is by the absence of any capital letter. All that is recorded is the square’s reference, where the Pawn finished its move. So, for example, ‘b4′ would mean a Pawn has moved to the ‘b4′ square.
Essentially, what you’ve just seen is the method we use to solve Chess Puzzles…
To solve the puzzles, we have to state the move in the same way that we record moves with Algebraic Notation. If you believe the solution is the Queen moving to the ‘h3′ square, you’d simply state ‘Qh3′ as your answer.
However, it’s not just moves; we may need to state if our solution includes other types of maneuvers, including Captures and Pawn Promotion, respectively.
There’s more to Chess Notation than this article can currently delve into. A quality Beginners Chess Guide should have what you’re looking for – any Chess Guide worth its salt will include a guide to learning Chess Notation (also known as “Annotated Chess”, or “Chess Annotation”… Either way, they’re the same thing).
Chess Puzzles aren’t just an intellectual way to pass the time; they’re tools we can all use to sharpen our chess-brain, to help us spot potential opportunities and threats that we may face whenever we play Chess.
Have a go at the Chess Puzzles at http://www.chess-game-strategies.com.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Graham_Wadden
