As chess parents, we want to make sure we did the best we can for our child, but we have also encountered situations where parents who do not play chess, emphasized on the wrong aspects of chess and cause pain and frustrations for both the parents and child. Through the information given below, we hope to provide a better chess experience for both chess parents and children!
All kids want to win when they are in chess tournament. However, chess is an unforgiving game, you can make 50 right moves, and with just 1 wrong move, you can lose the game. So please be understanding and comfort your child instead of scolding him for not being serious.
Especially for young players, playing bullet games are bad, as they are already playing very fast in rapid gams, and this only encourage them to play even faster, to the point where the goal of the game is not to checkmate the opponent, but rather to flag the opponent.
This will not be helpful to the young players, especially since they are new to chess and needs to learn how to slow down and put more thoughts into their moves first.
However, as the player progresses in their chess, playing bullet games can help to build their instincts in chess. so it does have its merits.
Blitz games has it merits too. The time is long enough for you to practice your opening moves. In such situations, the outcome of the games doesn't matter, it's playing out and correcting the opening moves that's more important. As the game ends faster, you get to practice your opening moves faster compared to rapid games time control.
This is an interesting observation that i will like to share with you, so far, I have not met any chess players attributes their bad games to playing variants, but rather credits the variants for improving their chess! A good examples is Bughouse. it's a teamwork game where your partner can pass you a piece that they capture and you can place it anywhere on the chessboard! There is a particular game that my own son was playing, and he was thinking that "whoa, if this is bughouse, it will be awesome if i can place a pawn at that particular square! and he suddenly realise that he could just slowly push his pawn to that desired square! He did just that and soundly won that game"
Youtube Chess Videos, In a bid to grab your attention, will promote their videos with opening gambits to trap your opponents. While such videos are enjoyable to watch. You are essentially playing "hope chess", you are just making moves and hope that opponents will respond accordingly and you can win the games fast. However, as your chess proficiency improves, you will be playing against stronger players, and you will find that such gambits doesn't work anymore and you will not know what to do if your gambit fails.
There is no best openings. Each opening has it merits. And players are encouraged to try new openings so they can have a better understanding of the openings and find an opening that they are comfortable with. It's not about the uniqueness of the opening, but about the depth of understanding that a player has with the different variations to that specific opening. In fact, for new chess players, opening has much lesser emphasis among the various aspects of chess to focus on!
Every time I hear this, I am always very tempted to invite that said parent to join in the tournament instead of just spectating from the side lines. Everybody blunders, even top players blunder (of course they blunder much lesser than us mere chess mortals) But to label a child as not serious in chess just simply because of a blunder is infuriating. Sometimes the best way to reduce blunders is to learn from your blunders and it can be so painful to the point that it will really sticks in your head not to commit the same blunders again.
I invite the parents to view this with a bigger viewpoint. Generally, it's correct, a young player tends to play too fast and didn't spend time calculating to see if there is a better move. However, with such a notion being drummed into the child player's head. I see cases where a player is going to lose in the next move, instead of resigning, the player will intentionally sit in the hall and wait for an additional hour before resigning, so that more time will pass and the coach or parent will not scold the child as the child has spend a long time in the tournament hall, not knowing that the child is simply dragging the time and the poor opponent has to wait for that additional hour for nothing. Such behavior stems from the insistence for long time spent in the game and accidentally create such a negative behavior from the child. A better alternative is to have the child write down the time taken for each move on the scoresheet, this will better allow the coach to analyze the move and determine if the child has consider long enough especially in positions where there are moves that required deep calculations.
Please do not ever do this. An engine can calculate many moves ahead, and the best move recommended by the engine might only makes sense only if the next 10 moves are made exactly correctly for example, and that might not be practical even for top chess players. So by comparing and berating your child for not considering the engine's recommended moves is not practical at all and only cause your child to be more frustrated.
If you want your child to be stronger in chess, defer to a chess coach. Do not assume to be an expert in chess just because you came across certain ideas online. Go through the ideas with your chess coach first to determine if it's suitable for your child.