A child may learn the secrets of life by seeing seven moves ahead on a chessboard, surmise members of the Berkeley Chess School and the San Ramon Valley YMCA.
They started summer chess camp Monday at Alamo Elementary School with more than 20 students participating, from Alamo, Danville, Walnut Creek, Castro Valley and other communities in the East Bay.
“It’s a fun thing,” said David Stambuck, a Berkeley Chess School instructor who teaches the program. “It’s exciting to see the children happy and learn new things. I see the light bulbs go on.”
The camp is comprised of students ranging from first-graders to seventh-graders. It runs for three weeks, and classes are divided into groups of students by levels of experience. Chess instructors teach children the basics about the game, and they go over games played by chess grandmasters.
“I give them a path to follow when they play their game,” Stambuck said. “If you play it over enough, it mimics life.”
The object of chess is to strategize how to checkmate – capture completely – the opponent’s king.
Stambuck began the class Monday by teaching his students what the chess pieces are and how they move. Each side has 16 pieces, which are white and black. They each include eight pawns, two knights, two bishops, two rooks, one queen and one king.
But before Stambuck went into details, he gave them some basic concepts.
“Know the right idea, and the move will follow,” he said. “Play for the center!!”
He compared pawns to regular people at the bottom of the power structure. They are worth one point, and they can move two steps forward for their first move and then one square forward.
The rooks, he said, are one of the powerful pieces in chess. They can move vertically and horizontally. They need open files and lines to manuever, otherwise, if blocked by another piece, they are powerless.
The knights are one of the most clever, he said.
“This piece is the sneakiest and craftiest,” Stambuck said. He explained they move on an L-shaped pattern.
The two bishops are positioned one on a light square and the other on a dark square. They move swiftly on the diagonals on the board. And the queen – the most powerful piece – can move vertically, horizontally and diagonally.
“Be nice to ladies, and they will be nice to you,” he said about taking care of the queen.
After he finished the instruction, his students played lively chess games where they applied Stambuck’s ideas and explored how the pieces work.
“I enjoy chess because it’s so much fun moving and controlling 16 pieces,” said Paul Andreini, a third-grader from Hidden Valley Elementary.
“Every class I teach is unique,” Stambuck said. “I teach them at a level that they are going to absorb.”
Elizabeth Shaughnessy, a mother of three and an Olympic Chess Champion for the Irish Women’s Team, started the Berkeley Chess School when she was asked to teach after-school chess at her son’s school in 1982.
Eighty boys and girls turned out for the first day of class. And 24 years later, the Chess School has more than 5,000 girls and boys from kindergarten through 12th grade in more than 140 schools throughout the Bay Area.
The school offers eight regional chess tournaments, including two all-girls tournaments, summer classes and Friday night chess classes in Berkeley and Walnut Creek. The school has taught children with special needs and developed an international chess exchange program with an Irish school.
The school has also undertaken an outreach program in Richmond elementary schools. For more information about the Berkeley Chess School, visit its Web site at www.berkeleychessschool.org.
Instructors from the school have been in Alamo for a number of years, said Karla Schreffler, YMCA program coordinator for the chess camp. She said she asked the school to conduct chess camps for the San Ramon Valley YMCA four years ago.
“It’s been a dream,” she said. “I think if all education works like the Berkeley Chess School, the world wouldn’t have as many problems.”
“They are engaged,” she said about the kids involved in the camp. “They are learning.”
For more information about chess camp for kids in Alamo, call 831-1100.
