Chess: Play It, Study It, Build With It

by bam

A complete, cited chess course for high school students: how to actually play (the board, the six pieces, check and checkmate, castling, en passant, promotion, and how to read algebraic notation), the rulebook itself (the FIDE Laws of Chess, touch-move, the clock, and the five different ways a game can be drawn), how to think (opening principles, forks, pins, skewers, discovered attacks, and the endgames every player must know), fifteen centuries of verified history (chaturanga to shatranj to the fifteenth-century queen, Steinitz to Deep Blue to AlphaZero to the 2020 online boom), how organized chess fits together (FIDE, Elo ratings, the title system, the Olympiad, US Chess, and the online platforms), and the honest economics, why almost nobody earns a living playing chess, and the many real ways to build a life or a business around the board anyway.