Train Chess as you train to play Football (3)

This is a series of articles where it is about teaching chess as if it were the training of a football team. Train your chess with a few simple exercises. At the end of this article, you have available the first 2 parts. The ideal is to start in order, although it is not necessary to do it that way.

I will explain in this third chapter how a tower moves and some tasks that can be done in class so that students learn the movement of this piece. These tasks will be equivalent to touching the ball performed by football players. In training a professional footballer spends at least 10-15 minutes touching the ball. Chess the equivalent is moving the piece, making a move.

How towers move

The towers move in rows or columns, horizontally or vertically and capture a rival piece taking its place. They cannot jump, pass over the pieces of their own side. The equivalent in the Middle Ages would be the catapult. In the Marvel universe he would be Captain America.

The catapult was a military machine of antiquity for launching objects over long distances. The rook in chess moves over a long distance, since it can move in rows and columns. Captures a rival piece taking its place.

On an empty board with only a tower, ask your students to move it from square “a1” to box “h8”. They must write on a form that boxes have toured the tower. That is, you must put 1. Ta1-b1. 2. Tb1-c1, and so on until you reach Th8. Ask students to create at least 5 paths from a1  to h8 and order them from most moves to fewest moves. Repeat the exercise 5 times.

Here is a concept for a game that combines chess and football using rook moves. Let’s call it “Torres Fútbol Chess”.

Objective of the game: The objective is to bring the rook towards the opponent’s goal and score a goal, using the basic rules of chess.

Materials:

• Chessboard
• 2 teams of chess pieces (preferably with rooks of different colors)
• A small ball

Rules of the game:

1. Preparation:
   • Place the chessboard on a flat surface.
   • Each player chooses a team of chess pieces. The towers will be used as players on the field.
   • The remaining pieces are placed in their standard initial positions on the board.
   • Place the ball in the center of the board.
2. Shifts:
   • Players take turns moving their towers, as if they were football players on the field.
   • During his turn, a player can move one of his rooks according to the rules of rook movement in chess. The tower can only move in straight vertical or horizontal lines, without jumping over other pieces.
   • The objective is to bring the tower towards the opponent’s goal and score a goal by moving the tower to the goal box.
3. Ball movement:
   • The ball can be moved in each turn after moving the tower.
   • When a rook moves, the player can move the ball to a square adjacent to the rook, in any direction (vertical, horizontal or diagonal), as long as that square is unoccupied.
4. Score a goal:
   • To score a goal, a player must move the rook to the opponent’s goal square, while the ball is in a square adjacent to the tower.
   • If a player scores a goal, a point is scored and the game is restarted with the pieces in their starting positions. The player who scored the goal has the first turn in the next game.
5. Game Ending:
   • Play continues until a predetermined number of goals is reached, such as the best of 3 or 5 matches.
   • At the end of the game, the player with the most goals wins.

This game combines the strategic aspects of chess with the excitement of football, giving children the opportunity to practice rook moves while having fun. I hope you enjoy it!

Summary

This article is part of a series in which I create original content to train chess as if it were football. In this third chapter we talk about the towers and the way in which you can train with them. Chess is trained in many ways; this is one of them.

If you are a chess monitor and you carry out what I just put, please I would love you to leave a comment to know how it has gone and thus enrich this article. In addition, you can contribute your own ideas. Thank you.

Follow the series

In this section I will add the articles of this series.