If you watched The Queen's Gambit and were super excited to start playing chess, wondered how sports teams use chess strategy in their games to win, or were looking for something more challenging than playing video games or solving word problems, now is the time to make your move.

Welcome to Chess 360! This is the Montpelier Senior Activity Center's chess club for beginners of all ages. Hosted by Professor Bill Jolley, PhD | MBA & Robert Nichols, Chess Instructor. All classes begin at 3pm.

Come Play Chess With Friends!

Chess is a creative activity in critical thinking. Chess 360 is intended to be an opportunity for players of all ages with beginner backgrounds to learn and improve their playing strengths, to gain an appreciation of chess as both a sporting activity, a mental gymnasium, and to enjoy playing others of similar strengths. We will present the basic ideas and definitions unique to the game, we will discuss the fundaments of opening systems, and strategic and tactical concepts in the different stages of a game, and we will introduce the beginner to historic and current grandmaster play to see how these ideas work in practice. Our goal is to develop an appreciation of chess as a universally played game for its ability to enhance the development of intuitive problem-solving skills among all ages in a fun way.

See website for an outline of the weekly sessions' content. All chess games have three stages – the opening, the middlegame, and the endgame. Players use different strategies and tactics in each. We break down the complexities of chess rules and grandmaster (GM) lessons through these three stages so you can learn more quickly and advance your skill level while having fun playing. We call this the 360 View. As a beginner, once you complete this class, you'll go into your first game armed with a basic understanding of the game.

Even though we cover many of the game's most practiced aspects we'll just be scratching the surface of the possible solutions. You will want to train yourself by practicing these problems in deductive reasoning against other players and chess computers. You will be exposed to two types of decision processes when choosing what moves to make. These are called the tactical and the positional. The tactical approach decides on a move by "calculating" the relative advantage to be gained by a single candidate move. The positional approach determines the relative advantage of a move based on advancing the collective strength of the material relationships. Referring again to Table A, the puzzles under the heading "Chess Practice" will step you through these two approaches. Players early in their careers develop a preference for one or the other to eventually become masters of it. Be aware though that more skilled players whose repertoire includes a wide selection of offensive and defensive systems will attempt to trip up budding amateurs by deviating from the playbook, leaving their opponent in doubt about what to do next.

CONTACT MSAC TO LEARN MORE:
802-223-2518 | msac@montpelier-vt.org

Event Info

Dec 27, 2024, 8 AM to 5 PM

Dec 27, 2024, 7 to 9 PM

Jan 3, 2025, 7 to 9 PM