I'm a teacher. This is not a chess video. This is a teaching video. That is a compliment. Also, easy to get the idea this guy isn't humble and understanding with all the jokes. Clearly he is.

I love that Ben had this compassionate and nurturing side, you don't see it very often 😜 also nice to see content that's more educational and similar to the lectures

17:09 "Everything's difficult when you don't know it" - That quote got stuck in my head. It's for stuff like this that I not only admire Ben for his chess content, but I also admire him for the person he is.

I'm embarrassed to say that i was guilty of too quickly showing double attacks and discovered attacks to kid players

I enjoyed this video not because it explains what to teach beginners, but that Ben truly cares about the game of chess and helping those get better no matter how "bad" the player may be. No air of superiority. I loved watching this and love watching you.

Thank you Ben, this gave me a lot to think about when it comes to teaching my little sister chess, a lot of great puzzle examples and I definitely have been showing her too complicated ideas

“We live in a world where everyone is mean including me!” Best Ben quote ever. Truth hurts and so forth.

Wow, I think this is the best piece of advice ever given to chess coaches. Great stuff.

I remember growing up my dad didn't know what to do with me so after Bobby Fischer teaches chess and me just playing at the school club, he just set me on Lazlo Polgar's Chess book...and there's like hundreds of mate in one puzzles in that book. Kept me busy for a long while!

I love these Ben stories- just gives me the motivation to keep going regardless of losing so many games in a row. Need to love the process!

this guy understands not only the game itself, but the teaching of it. It's truly refreshing to see, and Mr Finegold's humilty is an inspiration.

My approach is to enjoy chess. I don't even strive to improve. Scratching that intellectual itch every now and then, when I feel like it. Eventually and inevitably something mind blowing and exciting comes up (position, tactic, particular game) that makes it all worth. And I have become slightly sharper.

This really rings true to me. I tried teaching my nan some chess the other day but it quickly became clear that she just didn't share the same understanding of the game I did. I was trying to explain how the Knight can fork pieces and she admitted that she didn't see why it worked, even with the position on the board right in front of her. I realized I was starting waaay too high level and probably should've just stuck with how the pieces moved. At the same time, I remember a time when I was like my nan, and it's kinda crazy to think how much stronger I am now than then - I hardly feel like I'm a good player, but I can see I'm much stronger than I once was.

7:45 "they would if they could" thanks twitch chat

Verbiage was the biggest stepping stone for my chess journey. Pins, skewers, forks, batteries etc. Verbiage and basic concepts, such as the 5 pillars of chess, really helped me begin to understand positions. I wish I had fallen in love with chess earlier in life.

Your amazing Ben. First off you teach with humor and sarcasm. Love it. Thanks for teaching me chess. I have played 700 games and am stuck around rating 600. This video helpful

This is genuinely one of the best videos out there in chess because it perfectly explains why it's hard to introduce new people to chess. Even if you're 900, you know how the pieces move you're just making 1 move blunders. I tried teaching my friend who loves chequers, who had never even really seen a chessboard before and it's a whole different experience. She really struggled to get her head around that initial "pawns can move twice sometimes, and capture diagonally". And I also struggled to find the best way to teach it because I was looking at it like "how do you not even see that the pawn can move forward". It takes a special understanding of the game to get into the mind of that level of beginner.

I'm not a beginner, but as someone who used to be a beginner, and was one for longer than I knew I was I really love the way you explain stuff in your videos. You're probably one of the nicest people in ChessTube.

This is amazing. Coming from such a fantastic player and without any judgement. Thank you for all the amazing content.

This is a really good video on teaching that has lessons that apply outside of chess as well. It's so important when you are teaching someone to understand their perspective.

Man too bad we on the internet usually get trash Ben... You can easily see how much passion the man has for the game and for teaching Oh well I guess that's what we deserve, as the internet itself is trash. Keep enjoying this beautiful game

This was very uplifting. Thank you. It’s also refreshing to hear you speak so positively for a change. 🙃

This is great--the tone is really kind and obviously informed by lots of experience. I will add that one of the central lessons here--that students know less than you might expect--is generally true. I teach and lecture a bit and have found that students will always nod, say "Oh right, sure", and so on, and then when I ask them about the material in a slightly different way it's obvious they have no idea what I was teaching. Learning anything well takes a lot of time and (ideally) hands-on experience.

Appreciate the help Ben. I played a little as a kid but never had a coach. Only picked it back up after the queens gambit. After advancing very quickly from about 400-800 but then I hit a wall. Took a break and now I’m trying to start over.

Needed to hear this, thanks Ben. Been having some rough games online lately and feeling like I'm just no good at the game. Started playing in earnest a few months ago after being familiar with the game since I was a kid.

Wow this was one of the best videos actually. Thanks Ben!

Dear Mr. Finegold, I’ve been watching your videos for a long time and this video is a gold nugget. The best advice by far I’ve ever seen in the Internet. I’ve been a fan of chess for many years and have been trying to study it hard with little achievements. The way you put it made me rethink and realize that my problem might be that I study too much and play too less. I’m always scared of loosing and that has prevented me to play, specially online. Again, thank you so much for this video.

20:00 Lol, this puzzle is hard for an advanced student, too, because my eye skips right over the ridiculous moves (Qd3, Qd2, Qf3)

Love this video and your humor. Thank you very much. You give me the motivation to keep playing.

As someone that teaches kids chess in a school setting I really appreciate this. I do tend to start off with how do the pieces move and a few things like this but I tend to want to get into stuff like back rank mate, ladder mate a little bit too early probably.

Awesome video. So useful, i recently started coaching a friend who's 650 and i forgot how hard that can make it for him but glad I've got 5 great puzzles to work on with him now :)

Extremely well presented. Thank you GM Finegold.

It is really a rare and valuable thing to have a GM level player who struggled for a long time when he was young. It makes him uniquely able to understand what beginners are actually experiencing. Start slow and very basic, learn to move the pieces, then learn to not hang one every game. And that alone can be a long term, years long project, especially if you are young or have limited time.

Thank you for the content

It's like listening to great music through great speakers instead of cheap earphones for the first time! Great video, thank you for your insights on education!

Wonderful video - gives me a motivational boost. Thank you!

Thank you so much for this! My son has been begging me to play chess with him. I just started playing this week. This lesson helped me a ton! Now I don’t feel so dumb when my son beats me over and over 😂 I need to catch one of your streams soon 😊 Thanks so much!

thank you sir for this lesson.

Great video. A good way to help yourself empathize with / understand that absolute-beginner mindset is to spend a bit of time learning another chess, like shogi or xiangqi. When you do that, you remember that even keeping track of the names of the pieces is hard at first, never mind how they move.

Great video, thanks Ben!

He's right. I've taught many dozens of people Skat (a card game that's similarly complex as bridge). I see a lot of similarities, you can't start with bidding, you can't start with counting, you can't start with value calculations. You start by which card is higher, how to follow suit, etc

Thanks Ben. I want to teach my son chess and hearing these ideas on how to teach little kids is incredibly helpful.

Just a nice video. Thanks Ben

This is super helpful. Teaching my 6 year old now, and it's great to remember this stuff.

ty so much GM Ben , im teaching my daughter and i showed her the queen checkmate position, she found the bishop check and the queen checkmate , im happy AF for her :D , you are a great guy

So much truth spoken here. Failing over and over is the best way to learn anything in life. What really matters is sticking to it until you make it.

The math thing is really accurate. I had a fantastic Pre-Calc and Calc, and Stats teacher. Now I'm majoring in Actuarial Science.

Such a great advice. Not only in chess but generally.

I still don't consider myself intermediate and I've been playing on and off for 30 years. In the 90's I started a chess club at UNCCharlotte and got spanked by the Russians in the beginnings, though I could hang with the Spaniards and Italians... Studied Josh Waitzkin's Chessmaster 2000 for about 5 years while working as a desk clerk. I still can't play anything shorter than a 10 minute game without just moving pieces randomly...

15:13 Omg we are back with Mike Kummer jokes Yeees

I learnt to play chess in a club and they used the books of rob brunia & cor van wijgerden, it goes from step 1 to 6 & learns you the tactics step by step.

Great video!

10:13 Yes, I totally 100% saw this tactic

great vid thanks!

Ben, I really like your talk. So empathetic and grounded.

This is incredibly useful. I taught myself how to play, so I have no reference about how to teach others. Thanks.

You kind sir, are a true gentleman and a scholar...thank you for all of your educational content.

This reminds me of a quote from Karl von Clausewitz (just replace "war" with "Chess") "Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen war." On War (1832-4) bk. 1, ch. 7, tr. J. J. Graham

ben is like the very cool uncle you have that you dont meet nearly enough that can explain everything very well, cool lesson to bignners on how to learn chess AND to advanced players on how to teach chess

Very inspiring!

I'd recommend watching the entire stream

Amazing how many people during the Live Chat said, "How can someone be that new and watching this channel?" Well, guess what...there are a lot of us! I just learned pawn's only capture diagonally! I turn 43 this year and have never played chess...always wanted to...never got around to it, but I am thinking of starting with my kids. Thank you, good sir!

Thanks for the video - this will help me teaching my nephews and niece to play!

Yep, back when I was a kid, I always forgot how stuff moved when I was first taught, lol! Without knowing how the pieces move, tactics fall on deaf ears as you'd never have a grasp on it because there's so much going on at once. My grandpa (and my teacher) did have some ways to help get it down. Namely by the piece shape. Rooks are mostly straight so they move in straight lines, Knights have a L-shaped head, Bishops have the diagonal cut in them, Queens have 8 points for 8 straight directions all around and Kings are like the queen but one. But Pawns... They have nothing. So I'd forget the possibilities of those more than others. I also never remembered castling or En Passant after being shown them for a while. If one forgets those times they had while learning, they may just assume "beginner" means "knows how the pieces move but doesn't have much idea on tactics". Then they get nowhere. So it ends up being a thing of knowing your audience before giving the lesson.

my friend watched me play chess a lot and wanted to learn and he knew the basic rules but was just basically losing nonstop. then I showed him some basic pattern stuff, and he went on to win game after game against low rated players just because i had taken the time to show him what a discovered attack was and said "almost everyone at your level will miss this, here's how to see it", or showed him how to win an exchange in some common openings (again, just pattern recognition and how to SEE the pattern) and he's pushing 1000 now and playing pretty competent games. he still makes one-move blunders every now and then, and he isnt playing moves out of naroditsky's "Mastering Positional Chess", but you can tell he's setting up these little tricks that he knows the patterns of. it's cool to see

This is weird and fascinating for me... When I was 7 my dad set up a board, he taught me what a check and a chenkmate was, how the pieces move etc. After that we played about 3-4 matches and by the last of them I knew evrything he told me but got infuriated that I didn't beat them swiped the pieces off the board and that was that.. Now at 22 I saw a Hikaru short on youtube and learning chest again but I still remembered everything despite not playing for over 15 years

That's a fair ASSESSMENT 💯

And this is the reason why you are GM Benjamin Finegold and we are not. Thanks for the invaluable lessons Ben. Means a lot.

Those middle row long horizontal queen moves stay tough for a long time!

Hi Ben. More of this would be fine to me and gold to people looking to improve.

All of that broadly applies to the process of acquisition of any skill. Any. And kids don't really have it any easier. It takes them years and a lot of trial and error to learn how to speak, how to read or write. You know all that stuff you just take for granted later on and which you once had a very hard time learning. Learning a new non-trival skill is tough man, fucking tough.

Thank you, Ben! I'm trying to teach my 6 year old and this gives me some great tips on how to do that.

I got scholar mated only once, it was the reason I obsessed over chess the years after, it was in a mall kids tournament final where the first price would have been a super nintendo and the guy that won only did the scholars mate, so I was intrigued.

Go Ben!

This was amazing, and as a language teacher I can add it's very similar. Most "beginner" materials aren't really for beginners, which is frustrating.

That's true. If you stick to something during years eventually you'll be good. Because even ifnthere was better ppl if they gave up it doesn't matter. Attrition is your best friend.

Ben is such a great coach. If I'd had a coach like Ben when I was younger I'd be a grandmaster now. True story.

I love this video. I’m currently teaching my son how to play chess and it’s really reset my paradigm on how I should be teaching him

Thank you so much, I learn chess for 3 days, and I'm very frustrated, your video is the only video I really understand.

I learned more from this video than from reading Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual 5 times. Go Ben!

I think whats important to realize is that people who are good at something didnt usually become good because they wanted to be good so badly but because they simply loved doing something, then did it a lot and became good in the process. If youre mainly doing something because you want to be really good one day, youll just be constantly frustrated because youre so bad and youll have to keep doing this activity that youre not enjoying to the fullest for such a long time until those magical days when youre finally good.

I teach simple checkmates first (after the rules) starting with QK vs K. I think having only one or two pieces at a time makes it much easier to grasp, then the player can start putting them together.

Ben is a wonderful teacher

Ben i love you. Thanks for being there. But stay please

Love your channel Ben, it's awesome. I understand most of your cultural references and you are very entertaining, with an obvious love of the game. Thanks for the content and teaching. I'm 42 and finally getting serious about chess, playing a bunch and trying to improve.

Thanks

"everything is very difficult if you don't know it" "you get very good at chess if you play a lot of it. That's how you get good at anything" This guy isn't only a chess genius, he should talk to 16 year old kids in schools. I wish I had someone tell me these things when I was that age.

Wow! Great lesson in empathy for _any_ teacher, not just of chess. I've heard the same thing from music teachers, math teachers, et. al...--at least the good ones. Patience with one's self is not an easy thing. It's a shame that Ben isn't teaching any longer: empathy is an extremely undervalued skill.

My favorite Ben finegold is the compassionate still a little bit mean Ben. Never change.

thanks Ben

That's more of a message to coaches teaching absolute beginners

Very good!!!!!!

I remember my first tournament. I had prepared a bit, learned the basic opening and a few tactics. I was in a round robin of three games. I lost the first two games and I played against someone else from my club that also lost their first two games. She played a weird reaction to king pawn opening and I think I had a checkmate at move 6, the king was smothered and couldn't get out of my queen's diagonal. I had to ask a tournament official if it was checkmate. After that, I knew that I would win in chess as long as I fought through the losses and kept learning. I read the books my club had during my classes, I played during lunch, I was obsessed. I started winning a lot more. I ended up 1100 USCF after two years which I was proud of. Chess club moved to mornings so I stopped going but I play online sometimes. It's a life long journey.

I think often the beginners Ben is talking about were never interested in learning chess but their parents thought they should learn how. One chess club on Long Island ran beginner tournaments for children every Monday night for years. And I'm pretty sure most of those kids were only there because their parents liked the idea, not because they wanted to be there. I met numerous chess moms who regularly brought their kids to play (and maybe even brought them to chess lessons too). Some of those chess moms were very bright and articulate, but not one of them had any interest in learning to play chess! Nothing is easy to learn when you have no interest in it and are only being forced to learn it. In my own case, to put it mildly, I was pretty untalented for chess. But I was highly motivated to learn it. And I didn't find my beginner books hard to understand at all. I was bad for a long time because I simply couldn't calculate worth anything. So it still took me 3 years to get from 0 strength to 1400. In spite of what Ben says, that is not very impressive. Then it took me another 10 years to get my first 1800+ rating. I got as high as 1970 but then I went to law school and being a lawyer is horrible for your chess! It is true that some really great chess players have been lawyers. Paul Morphy and Alexander Alekine come to mind. But every lawyer I ever knew of who was even 1800+ rated in chess was at least that strong before they became a lawyer. I never heard of anyone becoming a lawyer first, only then learning the basics of chess, and ever becoming any good at chess. As for Ben's story about playing for years before reaching 1200, I'm pretty sure if he had learned chess when he was say 14, he would have progressed much faster to 2000 and beyond. Everything takes time including learning patience and discipline, qualities that are rare in those under 10 years old. That may explain why Bobby Fischer also played for years before showing any particular talent for chess but then suddenly got good. Fischer was no chess prodigy even though he won the U.S. Chess Championship at 14. On the other hand a few prodigies get good before turning 10, sometimes long before 10. But even among great chess players relatively very few showed any particular chess talent until they reached at least 11 years old. Then again I heard of a number of children who could play blindfold chess at a sighted 1800+ level before reaching 10 who never got much stronger than 2000 strength. And a number of Grandmasters have told me they knew many players far more talented than they were who never got close to Grandmaster strength.

6:32 Most inspiring words ever said in a YT video

This is Zen Ben. I like it!

I think a kind of flipside of this - but definitely not for people just learning the movement of the pieces -, sometimes having some more theoretical knowledge means you have more vocabulary with which to observe your own practice, so it can be easier to learn. Like, it can be easier to simply remember things about a position if you've been exposed to some ideas which help describe/name chunks of it, even if you don't quite understand how these concepts should be applied or leveraged in practice directly. (just to be clear, this can of course simply overwhelm you, so ymmv)

That Tombstone quote at the start 👌👌👌

I love how Ben, even though he's a GM, really knows what a beginner is. Some 2000 ELOs on cc will go "oh, you're a beginner" after you play for like a year and can find some pretty nice tactics, even though they're not master level tactics.

Thank you Ben. I am fluctuating between 1000 and 1100 for a year now