All Roads Lead to ChessKid

Hampton Roads Chess Association, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit affiliate of US Chess located in southeastern Virginia, has been using ChessKid Gold accounts for our students for nearly a decade.

Over the past few years, we’ve experimented with a variety of other chess curricula in our tournament training club (Hampton Roads Scholastic Chess Club or HRSCC), in our after-school chess programs, and during the COVID lockdowns, in our Virtual Chess Center classes.

While I won’t name any of those curriculum packages here, I can say we loved them all for various reasons. Some were great at introducing chess to young beginners, some were great at mastering concepts one at a time, some were great at spiraling back to a basic set of concepts at increasing levels of difficulty, and all contained the material to build a firm foundation in chess for our young students. Some were also more visually appealing to kids than others.

However, as we picked up other curricula with their own homework requirements, the kids in those classes drifted away from using their ChessKid Gold accounts. And something perhaps unsurprising happened: We experienced a lapse in our steady production of new kids passing a 1000 Elo rating and beyond – so far 52 kids we’ve trained, all the way up to Expert and National Master (the average rating of 32 currently active "graduate" kids is about 1475).

During the time we were focused on other options, we still had several kids join the 4-digit club, but they were all kids who were approaching the mark before COVID, who had gotten their start under our ChessKid incentive structure, and who were already hooked.

Starting with the COVID disruption, not a single new kid achieved an online (and we had an extremely active online program during COVID) or over-the-board (having returned to OTB play in May 2021) rating of over 1000 until 2023, a full two years after returning to playing over-the-board.

What was missing? Clearly, ChessKid was the marginalized piece these past few years. With its "level" system of progressive lessons providing a firm foundation and allowing kids to learn at their own pace, the wealth of additional learning material to explore in the form of videos and articles, and the built-in practice of games (enhanced by the newer analysis feature), puzzles, and workouts, ChessKid was a complete training package, while the others were simply lessons with specific puzzles for homework. 

The 2022-2023 season marked the return of HRSCC in its original form... complete with our ChessKid incentive structure. And when our largest after-school chess program (Old Donation School, a recipient of one of the Levy Rozman scholarships) requested that we return to ChessKid as the central focus for 2023-2024 (because, among other things, they had not “graduated” any kids to 1000+ since before COVID), we felt validated in our belief that it remains the single best source to produce strong young players.

Additionally, most of our school chess programs are in their infancy since the pandemic, and ChessKid's Lesson Planner feature is a great resource for our coaches to guide new groups of students through the basics in class. 

There’s a caveat – in our experience, unless ChessKid usage is incentivized in young students, only a small handful will put in a great deal of work on their own. It’s simple child psychology. Young kids need extrinsic motivation – i.e. a reward system – to achieve a desired behavior.

As they grow and mature, intrinsic motivation kicks in, and they no longer need external incentives – they just want to be better, and so they put the work in. Since writing previously about motivating kids to put in the work on ChessKid, we’ve modified that incentive system so kids are only competing against themselves in our annual challenge.

We use the group report cards to tally up their number of activities in a set period of time (the entire school year or the summer for the ChessKid Challenge) – counting puzzles, slow and fast games, workouts, articles, lessons, and videos – and kids can earn certificates, engraved medals, and small or large trophies depending on their level of activity.

It doesn’t matter if they fail to correctly solve a puzzle or if they lose a game – they are learning, so it “counts.” For our “Star of the Month” and “Star of the Year” awards, we simply count the number of stars (which mark success and not just effort) to pick the winners. We also award colored chess keychains for each set of levels (Pawn through Queen) they complete, and for the first 10 King levels. To keep them going beyond King 10, we award one “chess buck” for each level completed, and these bucks can be spent in our chess store for real merchandise, ranging from treasure chest trinkets to chess clocks and anything in between.

Kids will do anything for a shiny piece of plastic. So, we use this Jedi mind trick to get them to put the work in – because we KNOW it will make them stronger players. And ChessKid really doesn’t feel like work or homework to them because it’s downright FUN.

This is far from a controlled scientific research study, but my empirical observation that ChessKid was behind the results we were getting pre-COVID got me thinking, and I took a look at our ChessKid levels broken down by ability groups.

HRSCC, based in Virginia Beach, uses aquatic group names to break kids down for training. Where were the kids in each group sitting in terms of ChessKid usage, I wondered? Here’s what I discovered.

The kids in our absolute beginner group, the Minnows, who were still in that group toward the end of the season, had barely touched their ChessKid accounts all season. The vast majority were in the Pawn levels. Our Rockfish group, advanced beginners having mastered the basics and preparing for rated play, and who didn’t feel ready to go rated even toward the end of the season, were almost all in the Rook levels and below.

Among our Swordfish group of kids rated under 300, most never finished all the Queen levels – hence not even a complete foundational course. Yes, we teach the foundations in class, but if they do nothing but sit in class for 45 minutes a week and do no work at home, it’s not sticking.

Now things progressed predictably – our Dolphin group of 300-500 rated kids averaged King 9, our Shark group of 500-700 rated kids averaged King 23, and our Orca group of 700-900 rated kids averaged King 55. Of the kids who had “graduated” from HRSCC and were playing at the advanced / open club, they averaged King 58 before moving on to Chess.com. Many of them were ChessKids before the current number of levels existed, so that figure is lower than it would be on today’s ChessKid.

This was a rebuilding year across all our programs and especially in our developmental tournament club. I tell all these kids that those 52 kids who passed 1000 and “graduated” to advanced play all had ONE thing in common when they were sitting in these seats…. They were OBSESSED with ChessKid.

By the end of this rebuilding season, we had produced our first new young 1000+ players, a young teen who was one of our monthly ChessKid stars and a top challenge finisher, and a 6-year-old boy who, you guessed it, won ChessKid Star of the Year and had double the number of points of anyone else in the ChessKid Challenge.

We look forward to filling up the last 12 squares on our 1000+ board soon with obsessed ChessKids!