You Have Found the Right Place!

This page will be home of Coach Jay's chess blog. As I help out with a few different teams, I will be consolidating teaching material here this year. This will also allow students to review lessons, catch up on material they might miss, or perhaps help a random passerby.

I am not a chess master or even expert, but I have been teaching chess to younger players for 8 years with some success. I collect information from numerous sources. Most of the basic ideas are not my own, but the organization of the information is mine.

For 2014-2015 I will be using the following grid to organize my teaching:

Openings	Middlegame Tactics	Middlegame Strategy	Endgame
Opening Principles	Chess Vision	Identifying Weaknesses	Checkmate Patterns
White Opening	Snap Tactics	Piece Play	Basic Endgames
Black Response  to e4	Seeds of Tactical Destruction	Static Positional Principles	Pawn Endgames
Black Response to d4	Calculation	Dynamic Positional Principles	Rook Endgames

Here is the grid in pdf form just in case you lose yours. :)

Instruction Grid

Of the four columns, tactics is almost certainly the most important. In addition, more foundational concepts are in the top rows while more advanced ideas occur further down the chart. However, a good chess player needs skills or knowledge in all of these areas.

Individual lessons will often focus on a specific cell of the grid. In many cases, books and books have been written on each of these topic areas or subtopics within them.

In general, I feel that the more foundational ideas (basic tactics, checkmating patterns) need to be committed to memory. Some skills need to be automatic. Other ideas require more theoretical study and thought.

In any case, welcome to the blog. I hope you find some of this information useful.