Black to play and win.<\/em><\/p>\nFirst question: Does anybody know if this trap has a name? I told my kids about the Fool’s Mate and the Scholar’s Mate, but I didn’t know a name for this one. It ought to be the Greedy Person’s Mate, because White’s main sin was excessive greed (4. Nxe5 and especially 5. Nxf7).<\/p>\n
Not too long ago I watched a lecture by Roman Dzindzichashvili about “Good Traps and Bad Traps.” This was his principal example of a bad trap, which he defined as playing an inferior move just to see if you can induce your opponent to blunder. In this case, Black’s inferior move was 3. … Nd4?, which violates opening principles and gives Black a disadvantage after either 4. Nxd4 (Dzindzi’s recommendation) or even 4. c3. Black is just rolling the dice and hoping that White will play 4. Nxe5, which admittedly is a tempting move. Dzindzi’s disdain (or perhaps I should say “dzisdzain”) for anyone who would play this way as Black was palpable.<\/p>\n
But even if it’s a bad trap, it’s a great lesson! Any game this extreme can teach beginning players a lot. First, there are many important tactical themes. There are forks (4. … Qg5 and 5. Nxf7), almost back-rank mates (6. Nxh8 Qxh1+), pins (the pinned bishop on e2 in the diagrammed position, and finally the exquisite smothered mate that ends the game (7. … Nf3 mate).<\/p>\n
I can tell you that the kids were really excited to discover all these things and especially the smothered mate, which really comes as a bolt from the blue if you’ve never seen this trap before. But for me, the best moment came right at the very end, when I was trying to sum the lesson up and explain why White lost.<\/p>\n
Here’s the thing. In any given lesson, about a third to a half of my students actually don’t participate. And it’s okay with me if, out of 18 kids, only 9 of them actually give me answers. The reason it’s okay is that we always have a range of people from absolute beginners to regulars who have been coming to the club for a year or two. It’s only natural that somebody who has only come two or three times will be a little bit hesitant to speak up. I let them decide for themselves when the time is right.<\/p>\n
So I was very curious when one of our newest participants, a girl named Cora who had never spoken up before, raised her hand. I eagerly called on her.<\/p>\n
“Because no matter how many points ahead you are, they don’t count,” she said. “You could have a million points<\/em> and still lose!”<\/p>\nIt’s fair to say that my jaw hit the floor. I couldn’t have summed the lecture up better myself. It was both a chess lesson and a life lesson, and she aced it! I couldn’t have been prouder of her.<\/p>\n
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Today’s chess club at the Aptos Library was one of the best I can remember. We had 18 kids, and everybody seemed to find a good match to play against. In the lesson I talked about an age-old trap: 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 Nd4? 4. Nxe5?! Qg5 5. Nxf7?? Qxg2 6. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":80,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[37,1363,9,25],"tags":[2440,537,380,88,675,3039,2735,2579,41],"class_list":["post-3291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chess-clubs","category-current-news","category-openings","category-people","tag-aptos-library-chess-club","tag-back-rank-mate","tag-children","tag-forks","tag-greed","tag-life-lesson","tag-pins","tag-roman-dzindzichashvili","tag-teaching"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/80"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3291"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3291\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3294,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3291\/revisions\/3294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/a>FEN: r1b1kbnr\/pppp1Npp\/8\/8\/3nq3\/8\/PPPPBP1P\/RNBQKR2 b Qkq – 0 7<\/p>\n