Checkmate at Chatham: Classroom Takeover

Chess class is a blast with teacher Jonathan! We play all new kinds of chess that we created, like “Dino Chess,” “Split Chess,” and even “War Chess.” 

We focused on checkmate patterns today. (Basically, it’s how you win the game with certain pieces.) Our favorites: Back Rank Checkmate, Smothered Checkmate, and Anastasia’s Mate! To test our these strategies, we played Queen’s Kiss of Death, which is a game played with only two pawns, a queen and a king. 

After break comes the most fun time of the day: trivia! Everyone who answers at least one question correctly (or closest to the real answer) wins an ivy point, and the person who answers the most trivia correctly gets a second ivy point! Did you know that there are 319 billion possibilities for the first four moves of a chess game?