Easy chess games for kids (mate in one)

Author: Lior Gradstein

2 Feb

In my journey to teach chess to Ido, an easy (I thought) job was to generate diagrams where he has to find mate in a fixed number of turns. Starting with mate in one.
It appeared that making diagrams is an easy task, as there are many programs (Linux and Windows) that permit this.
On Linux, the best I could find is scid. That’s cool as I use it to maintain my databases of games. Even cooler, is that scid development has just restarted (stopped around 2004!), with the help of Pascal Georges. Using scid (I’m using the 3.7devel2009 version) I can export games to HTML or even to LaTeX files.

At first I thought I’d create the endings myself, for example, using online diagrams generators or using Wikipedia/MediaWiki’s templates, but it was not so easy, so I thought about making a program to generate them.
Generating one from scratch would take me time I really don’t have, and there are just two python modules that give high-level functions to chess.
So I started looking for projects similar to mine, that include games with mate in one. I found a small database of mate in one on my favorite chess website, in the download section: a Chessbase datafile with 1171 mate in one studies! So cool.

Well, It was really a pain to convert that Chessbase (.cbv) file, as the only program able to convert to PGN is running on Windowsã€€(at least it’s free). You just have to follow the instructions from this thread.
After getting a nice PGN file, just open it with scid, go to “Tools”, then select “Write the filter”, and choose LaTeX. You’ll get a TeX file. Use you favorite TeX generator (Live TeX seems to be the one today), like this for example, to generate directly a PDF file:

cat mat_temp.tex |grep -v "\\\\$" > mate_in_one.tex

latex –output-format=pdf mate_in_one.tex

(Yes I had to cleanup a bit the file before generating the .pdf)

The result is here, 196 pages of tests (6 one each page) if you don’t want to fight with the missing TeX modules (you’ll need chess12.sty) and get a nice result.

I’m sure many people search for this kind of file, so I’m pretty happy to help other parents/coaches.

White mate in one

Edit: I added a PDF version without the solution included.

Tags: child, children, database, diagrams, generate, generator, kids, mate, mate in one, pdf, pgn

Filed under: chess, kid

5 Responses for "Easy chess games for kids (mate in one)"

Elijah Kaufman February 23rd, 2009 at 17:42 1
Very useful indeed. Is there a way to generate the pdf without the answers right below? Then they’d be fantastic as worksheets.
admin February 24th, 2009 at 00:12 2
Elijah, here is the PDF without any solution. I just left the score to know who’s supposed to mate as it’s not always white.
The kidz home April 22nd, 2009 at 18:53 3
thank you I am learning alot here.
Julian Deverell July 14th, 2009 at 12:42 4
It sounds like you went to a lot of effort to produce these pdf files so thanks for taking the time and having the good nature to post them for anyone to use. i have been using them with young pupils who have stated an interest in learning chess and they are proving to be a simple and easy way to learn the rules and play some games.
Richard August 29th, 2009 at 09:49 5
Nice to see someone taking the time to do this, presumably from the goodness of your heart as opposed to financial gain. Teaching youngsters to play chess is one of the best things you can do for their development.