English Chess Forum

Hi.
Suppose one student refers to your club. How do you determine how much s/he knows already?

Thanks in advance

Get an experienced (but not necessarily strong) player to play some games with them. You can then guess a level, then change the opponent. Guess again. Repeat as necessary.

It is not always easy. We had a new player who played great attacking chess and won splendid games... if he got out of the opening with a position where he was not totally lost.

Arguably a stochastic view of chess level,would include a separation of quality of position after the opening on say a 7 point scale (+- to -+) and style of player on a four point , Boston matrix like scale . as described by Lars Bo Hansen in his Gambit books on strategy with an incorporation of an averaged opponent factor and even an interaction term.

Maybe an ECF grading like approximation is better!

When I was a junior in Scotland attending a SJCA training event the late Danny Kopec assessed the strength of a group of us by seeing how many tactical puzzles we could correctly solve. There are plenty of books out there which use this approach.

(What one knows about chess is not necessarily the same as how strong someone is. Someone could know a lot but be weak because of e.g. Tactical oversights. Having said that the more someone knows the stronger they are likely to be although that may be because of the amount of work/practice they have put in to accumulate the knowledge. Also there are strong players with gaps in their knowledge e.g GMs who can't mate with bishop and knight, but they are rare.)

Start with mates in one,then in 2,etc...