Chess is a sport that calls for immense focus, perseverance and commitment to make it to the top. While you wish for your child to excel in the game and make a name for herself/himself in the world of chess, there’s also the perennial parental concern:
Chennai is all set to welcome the international chess community to its sunny settings this July. The city will host the 2022 FIDE Chess Olympiad scheduled between 26th July and 8th August. The decision came from the council members of FIDE who favoured the city for its annual event this year.
It was yet another stimulus for Indian teen chess as the country’s 15 year old chess prodigy R. Praggnanandhaa clinched the $12,500 worth title in the Julius Baer Challengers Chess Tour on 17 October 2021. While the victory helped him secure a spot in the Meltwater Champions Tour in 2022, yet another young player retained his title at the Junior Speed Chess Championship.
We are dealing with a young generation that is hooked to the internet. Social media defines and determines their lives. Apps and chats keep them breathing! And as the world is in the grip of a virus, they are enjoying their ‘viral’ fevers on whatsapp, facebook and more! You must have spent a significant amount of time convincing your kids to reduce their screen time, and in vain!
Chess can be a complex game if you don’t get the strategies right. It takes absolute commitment and interest to learn the tiny tricks that could place you in the list of finest players. Also, you can’t learn everything on your own. You borrow or even steal your opponent’s or mentor’s tactics to put up a strong competition. Even though you got everything right, there are certain moves that would keep your opponent pondering early in the game. Castling is one special move that could change the course of the game. However, you could only do it once in the game.
Does playing chess make people smart or smart people are attracted towards chess? We might never find out the right answer to that. However, we already know that chess is the game of kings and emperors. It helped them strategize and plan their warfare. It helps them defend their throne by scrutinizing attacking possibilities of their opponent.
For most parents, the arrival of a child is a vow to work towards the well being of their bundle of joy. As the child grows, their expectations and aspirations from the child increases gradually. What remains constant, is their wish to mould their child into a good human being, imbibing the basic humanitarian qualities and moral virtues.
Is your child a passive plodder who needs to be pushed around? Or is he/she a silent observer or perhaps a hyper energy-ball who requires some toning down? At Mind Mentorz we believe that the behavioral patterns of a child are closely associated with his or her mental development. We aim to season and temper the young minds in a magic pot of brain-games, channelizing their energies, creativity, and thought-process in a well-balanced and productive way.
Though many more adjectives can be used to describe a Chess Player, the above, gives an overall depiction of a person who has made playing chess, a profession in itself. If we have ever had the opportunity to meet a Grandmaster of Chess, we will know that; though they are a celebrity, they are in fact normal people just like us, normal, but in a little extraordinary way. The brilliance of their mind is clearly seen in the way they handle their game and the game of life. They are trained to think on the spot, plan their moves, strategize and succeed.
Just like our body muscles require a physical workout to stay healthy, even our brain needs some mental exercise to work properly and stay healthy. Some people have a misconception that the learning techniques deployed by the schools are enough and it helps the kid’s brain stay active. But in reality, most of the schools are teaching the children to mug up information instead of understanding the basics of each topic. So can a brain develop by just memorizing things? Definitely not!
With the world becoming more competitive every passing day, school education alone is not enough to prepare the children for tomorrow. Schools do impart knowledge, but they don’t run programs to take care of students who face learning and focus issues. Moreover, school programs are not designed to enhance the children’s soft skills and development of survival skills. The need to thoroughly prepare children for the life’s survival race has given rise to many afterschool programs. Though a lot of parents enroll their kids in multiple afterschool programs to restrict them from wasting their after-school time in unproductive activities, they are not aware of the many benefits that an afterschool program delivers.
In today’s competitive world, competition is not restricted to an adult’s work-life alone. Children also are exposed to fierce competition in academics, extra-curricular activities, and other life areas as well. To help the children get on the top of the game, a lot of parents are getting their children enrolled in different sports programs or other recreational programs. But what about nurturing the child’s mental skills in a fun way? Involving your children in sports and other activities do help their body to become active and less vulnerable to diseases, but sports don’t train your children’s mind to act wisely or become an independent thinker.
Chess is complex. We have to agree to that. The amount of calculations, thought processes and conceptualizations involved are perhaps more in chess than any other game. For a lot of us beginners, it could be a little scary as well, with the fear of embarrassment accompanying each move. When playing, it usually happens that a lot of our calculations go wrong and we end up losing coins. From accidentally losing pawns to completely forgetting about the unguarded queen, we would have seen them all.
There is no denying that kids have grasping skills that cannot be compared to any adult. The sheer focus – regardless of the span – kids have on their task or work lets them quickly comprehend, analyze, interpret and solve concerns appropriate for their age. That is exactly why parents should go an extra mile in helping them inculcate new skills right from an early stage.
Aman Thomas George and Vandana Srinivas Babu, students of Mind Mentorz an institute providing Chess Coaching in Kalyan Nagar, Bangalore, has become FIDE rated chess players after the recent BRDCA (Bangalore Rural District Chess Association) tournament. While Vandana has secured a rating of 1147, Aman secured a rating of 1107.
Everybody knows that a game of chess can be won by pulling a checkmate on the opposite king. But like in any game it need not always be a one sided result. Sometimes both the players may share laurels by ending the game in a draw. This is many a times used by players on the losing side to strategically avoid defeat. Let us sneak into the rulebooks to see the various ways in which a game of chess can end in a draw.
The team at Mind Mentorz is very proud of our student - Lakshanya for securing the 1st prize in her recent Chess Tournament. Lakshanya played in the Under 10 Category of the Rainbow Club Chess Tournament, held in Bangalore on Jan 21st, 2018 and secured 1st Prize in Girls category. She concluded the tournament with a score of 4/6 pts.
They say practice and perseverance make a person perfect. True that is and if you are venturing out to develop a new skill, you need more than these two attributes to consistently get better at what you intend to do. Precisely, you need the right exposure, mentorship and information about your interest to stay updated about it, learn trivia, interesting things only people within the circle of your interest would know, tips and tricks and what not! This specifically holds true for a game like chess, which cannot be confined to a book.
