The Twickenham Method of promoting chess in primary schools

Twickenham is famous as the home of Rugby Union, so the Twickenham Method of teaching chess starts, not with checkmate but with scoring a try: getting a pawn to the other end of the board.

Richard James, who devised the method, has been teaching chess for almost 50 years and is the author of the Amazon best-selling Chess for Kids. He has an international reputation for his views on how children learn and play chess.

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Learn a game in 5 minutes.

Play a game in 5 minutes.

Much more suitable for most young children than ‘big chess’.

Click here to learn the rules and play a game against the computer.

Ideal for both individual and team competitions.

While young children are able to learn how the pieces move at the age of 6 or 7, in most cases they lack the maturity to make very much progress in playing a full game of chess.

All children can derive a wide range of cognitive and social benefits from playing strategy games.

By and large, children will gain more benefit from mastering a simple game than from struggling with a highly complex game. Rather than teaching all the moves in half an hour, we start with a simple game and gradually build up the complexity until children are really ready for ‘big chess’.