Beat the Teacher at Chess - Win ¥1,000!

My first year students were expecting a regular English class today, the last Wednesday class before the summer holidays, but what they got instead was Sensei's "Beat the teacher" chess challenge!

None of the students had ever played chess before, and all but one of them were excited to give it a go, especially when I fixed a ¥1,000 yen banknote to the board and wrote,

You get this if you beat the teacher at chess!

I told them they could look up the rules on their smartphones and play a couple of practice games with each other before taking the "Beat the teacher" challenge.

As you can see from the photos, they crowded round the board, worked out the rules and started playing each other.

It has always been my experience that the chess challenge gets the students to work far harder than they ever do when going through a typical English class, and yet, they don't notice that they are working hard because they are playing. This year's first years are an especially playful bunch so it was delightful to see them learning and laughing and playing chess.

They played two games and in the early stages of each game I only intervened if they were doing something wrong like trying to take a piece with pawn on a backwards diagonal. Gradually, as basic attacking and checking possibilities began to appear, I increased the coaching, telling them that there was a nice move, or that they could attack the king, and eventually that there was a way to get to checkmate.

So engrossed were they in the two games that most of the class time had flown by, but with just 10 minutes left, they took the "Beat the teacher" challenge.

I had brought a chess clock for the challenge, and set it to 10 minutes for the students (who were playing as a group and had agreed to split the cash if they won - LOL), and 2 minutes of poor old Sensei.

When I started the clock and made a swift 1.d4 opening move and hit the clock again as fast as possible to save time, the already lively atmosphere went electric. I banged out my opening moves with barely 3 seconds spent of my meagre 2 minutes.

Then, about 8 moves into the game my time-saving instantaneous moves caused me to blunder a Bishop. Since the deal was that they would win the cash prize if I could not achieve checkmate in the two minute time limit, I began to fear for my hard-earned ¥1,000!

However, the students lacked the experience to make the game difficult for me and I was able to generate an attack that led to checkmate with just 18 seconds left on my clock.

The lunchtime bell had sounded about two minutes before the end of the game, but everybody was so engrossed in the game that not a soul responded!

We are having an end of term class party on Monday, so I told them to study chess over the weekend. On Monday I will bring some card games and also four chess sets. If enough students want to play chess we could either have a mini chess championship, where I will award the winner a ¥1,000 prize, OR a repeat of the Beat the Teacher challenge, or both...

For now, I still have my ¥1,000!

Cheers!

David Hurley
#PubChessBluffer

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