1. Take it easy on them. You don’t want to let them get away with making bad moves (that won’t improve their chess), so don’t just pretend to not see things. But you should intentionally make mistakes of your own and help them see how to take advantage of them.
2. Remove pieces from the stronger player. This is a traditional way to play chess with a handicap. You can remove as little as one pawn (and different pawns cause different problems) or as much as both rooks and the queen. This makes for a challenging and interesting game for the stronger player.
3. Switch places. Play through the opening and switch places once you get into the middle game. A good time to switch is right after they make a big mistake. Switch sides and let them figure out how to take advantage of their own mistake.
4. Let them make more moves to start the game. Give them two, three or four moves to start the game. They shouldn’t be allowed to move past the 4th rank as white (or 5th as black).
5. Use a clock. Give the stronger player 10, 7, or even 5 minutes while the weaker player has 30 minutes or more. Kids will still stress out and try to play fast moves, so you will constantly have to remind them to slow down and think.

But whatever you do, don’t let them take back moves. That’s a bad habit to start. They should still have to take back illegal moves, such as where a piece moves incorrectly or if the move results in check or doesn’t get them out of check.

For more ideas, Wikipedia has an entire article on chess handicapping.

[photo courtesy striatic]

1. Play with a clock. For some reason, kids love playing chess with a clock. A real clock is best, but in a pinch there are quite a few software clocks you can download for a laptop or PDA/smartphone.
2. Play Blitz. With only 5 minutes for each player, there is very little time to think. You get to play a lot of chess in a short period of time and get to make lots of mistakes to think about.
3. Play “the pawn game”. Only play with pawns, starting from their usual spots. Win by promoting a pawn or capturing all the opponent’s pawns.
4. Practice endgames. Set up just a couple of units in random spots around the board and play until a draw or checkmate. King vs. king and two rooks is a good starter, or a king and a couple pawns on each side.
5. Play Crazyhouse. On their turn, instead of moving, a player can add a new piece to the board to match ones taken from the other player. (Bughouse is a popular four-player two-board chess variant played at many kid chess club meetings.) There’s some debate about how much chess players learn from this, but it beats not working on chess at all.

[Photo via gadl.]

EPGY has consistently exceeded our expectations with each of our experiences with them.

Directly from EPGY program:

Stanford’s online high school adds grades seven, eight and nine

The Education Program for Gifted Youth at Stanford University will be adding three additional grades to its online high school.

Created in 2006 to meet the specific needs of gifted students, the EPGY Online High School (OHS) will add the seventh, eighth and ninth grades for fall 2009. Applications are currently being accepted, and classes for these grades will begin this fall. Full details are available at http://epgy.stanford.edu/ohs.

“The addition of these lower grades is particularly important, since this is where the frustration for these students so often begins,” said Cathie Wlaschin of the Malone Family Foundation, which provided an original gift of $3.3 million to launch the high school three years ago, and through the support of which the new grades are being added. The foundation provides scholarship endowments to select U.S. independent secondary schools to fund the education of gifted students with financial need. Through a separate program, the foundation also supports research on gifted education.

In the past three years, the EPGY Online High School has been fully accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges and approved as an online provider by the University of California. Enrollment has grown from 30 students to 135, with students coming from 20 states and nine countries. Seventeen students will be graduating this year, with five entering Stanford University in the fall.

“It had always been our intention to be a full six-year school,” said Patrick Suppes, director and faculty adviser of EPGY and a philosophy professor emeritus at Stanford. “With students of this caliber, it is essential that they be identified early and put to work. The sooner they are fully engaged academically, the better off they will be.”