Learning Chess Workbook Step 4

The step-by-step method has been developed by Rob Brunia and Cor van Wijgerden to teach children to play chess. A large number of schools and chess clubs in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Austria use this method for their chess lessons.

This method consists of six steps. Each step is accompanied with an instruction book with the teaching material to be used by the trainer / teacher / parent and a workbook with exercises for the students.

Step 4
The difficulty level of the material from the fourth step is higher than in step three. That is mainly the consequence of the increasing number of moves needed to solve the exercises.

Most of the topics require solutions which are 2½ move deep: White plays, Black answers, White plays, Black answers and Whites scores. That is why a good command and application of the topics from the third step are absolutely necessary.

Tactics are dominated in a large degree by the preparatory move. The immediate attack does not work yet and a preparatory action is necessary. All existing preparations are dealt with: luring, eliminating the defence, chasing, aiming and clearing.

Gradually, the positional aspects are going to play more and more (a modest) part in the games of the fourth step students. The best way to introduce this kind of vague topics is to use the endgame.

The lessons about material advantage and endgame strategy contain many strategic issues. Furthermore, the lesson about the weak pawns makes students aware to be ( a bit more ) careful while playing with their pawns.

The same applies to the lesson about the opening. Anyway, it remains best to deal with the positional factors while commenting the games of the students.

Workbook Step 3
Next to the exercises there are also reminders in the workbook. These are short recapitulations of the lessons from the manual for the students. There are 11 reminders:

• Eliminating the defender: interfering
• Double attack: luring 
• Eliminating the defence: blocking
• Pin: placing front and back piece
• Double attack: eliminating the defence
• Double attack: chasing and aiming
• Attacking the castled king
• Seventh rank
• Strategy in pawn endings
• Double attack: clearing
• Queen against pawn
• On the remaining 48 pages there are always 12 exercises a page. That means the total number of 48x12-37 (the drawings) = 539 positions.