Starting January 24th, Sahan Karunaratne, who was the External Events Coordinator in 2018-2019, will be hosting a 8-lesson workshop sequel to his Fall Beginner Workshop to introduce beginners totally new to the game or with very little training to the wonderful world of chess! Join Sahan and your fellow chess club members on Friday evenings 3-4 pm, online in our Discord server. As you explore the rules, learn about chess notation, game analysis, strategy and tactics!
Tentative Syllabus
Jan 24th – How to Stop Making Blunders!
Jan 31st – Learning Chess Notation and Analyzing the Game Move by Move
Feb 7th – Mating Techniques, King and Queen V. King and King and Rook V. King
Feb 14th – Mating Patterns
Feb 21st – The Skewer and the Pin
Feb 28th – The Double Attack
Mar 6th – Basic Endgame Theory
Mar 13th – Basic Opening and Middlegame Theory
Where: Hart House Reading Room
When: Friday evenings, 5:00 – 6:00 PM
Free entry for Hart House Chess Club Members!*
*A student membership costs only $25 and is valid for the entire year.
For whom is the Beginners Workshop intended?
The Beginners Workshop is for players who are either new to the game or else have
little to no training game.
What will you be able to do after completing all the workshops?
At the end of the workshop, you will be able to employ simple methods of evaluating positions; you will be able to apply common tactics such as forks, skewers and pins while thinking multiple moves ahead. Most importantly, you will drastically reduce the number of blunders you make (which will take your game to a new level!) and be able to defend against a considerable number of dubious traps. On the strategic side, you will be able to utilize opening principles to further strengthen both your attacks and defenses. You will also have developed the basic skills necessary in pawn endgames at their disposal and have knowledge of other key endgames.
What can you expect from each workshop?
The lessons are designed to train students in using multiple different recurring themes in chess to their advantage. This workshops are structured in such a way that reinforces past material and foreshadows upcoming topics. Each workshop will be mostly comprised of puzzles that are designed so as to allow the instructor to highlight the key patterns and ideas. Most lessons will incorporate a discussion of a real game to illustrate concepts in action.
Finally, please note that the motivation for providing these chess lessons is not just to make you better chess players but also to give you a sense of community at the Hart House Chess Club. We intend to make you confident in saying that you are a part of the chess community at large! We are trying our best to ensure that after these workshops are over, you will be able to read chess books, ask specific questions of your peers and thus rapidly improve. You can expect, if nothing else, that the workshops will demystify a lot of what is going on in the club, and any trepidation you feel will disappear!
Sahan has employed a vast number of strategies when teaching chess in the past as the president of his high school chess club. Some, such as exhaustively and exclusively reviewing an extremely complicated game, proved not to be beneficial or enjoyable. Others, such as starting off with the examination of simple positions and then turning to differing positions with the same underlying ideas but with increasing complexity have met with great success.
With very fond childhood memories of playing the game, Alyssa is thrilled to be returning to the world of chess in her capacity as President/Secretary where she hopes her past experiences coordinating Debate Tournaments will be of service to the club. Alyssa has been the Tournament Director of a number of events, each of which brought together over 200 competitors from across the province. Apart from chess and debating, her hobbies include the study of political and art history, and literature; she also enjoys playing tennis and piano, and skating.
Elly is a fourth-year student double majoring in Human Biology and Sociology. She strongly believes that the greater good of the society can only come from the dynamic interaction of people who strive to be better selves to better be themselves, much like chess players who strive to achieve self excellence and full potentials through constant game analysis and self improvement.
Sean Lei is a second-year Rotman student at the University of Toronto who is planning to major in accounting. He is an independent, free-willed, and strong spirit and is willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done. Beginning his chess career in 2012, he quickly climbed the rating ladder and achieved the National Master title in 2015. Since then, he’s taken a break from professional chess tournaments and has since then become a coach and instructor for various chess institutions around Toronto. Currently, he aspires to become a National Chess Arbiter in order to assist in the creation of chess tournaments that currently bring around so much joy to everyone who participate.
Tanner is beginning his second year studying behavioural neuroscience at the Scarborough campus in the Psychology PhD program. He is focused on finding out what happens when we let rats drink alcohol, but he still finds time to enjoy chess. Tanner has played chess since the age of seven, after learning from his dad. Following mild success growing up in Maryland as a three-time state champion (Pre-Teen, Middle School, and High School), he went off to study at Carleton College. There he became President of the Chess Club and took a team to the Pan-American Intercollegiate Championship for the first time in school history in 2014. Despite earning awards for Biggest Team Upset and Top Small School, as well as an individual prize for Top Alternate, that team lost badly to a team from the University of Toronto.
Hart House Chess Club 