"Kenneth Sloan" wrote in message
...


Data? No.

Observations. Yes.

0900 rated kids are usually excellent tactical players who like to go
for quick kills. They are always dangerous, because sometimes their
suicide attacks can occasionally succeed.

0900 rated adults simply play 3rd best moves, all game long, with little
imagination and no flair. They can beat players who drop pieces faster than
they do, but no one else.

Given the choice in a "win this game, or die" situation, I'll take the 0900
rated adult as my opponent. All I need to do against him is develop my pieces
into the center and wait for him to give me pieces. Against the kid, I
actually have to stay awake and not fall for a cheapo.

Note that these are comments about players with reasonably STABLE ratings of
0900. There's also the issue of how fast the player is improving. Kids
improve in fits and starts (very Piaget-like), and
sometimes play in pools that deflate their ratings. So, the 0900 rated kid is
even *more* dangerous. He might be underrated because we measured him badly,
or he might be underrated because he just learned
how to checkmate with only one rook. Yes, indeed, in my experience there are
lots of 1000 rated players who cannot mate with KRk. Over and over again I've
seen sub-1000 players who have memorized the Morphy Opera House Game, love the
Fried Liver Attack, and know the Albin Counter-Gambit 15 moves deep - but
cannot mate with KRk. To draw against such a player, you simply have to ward
off the cheapos. You can sac a rook to get out of immediate trouble and then
wait for them to flounder in the endgame. You can't *win* that way, but you
can draw.
Even the worst player in the Kindergarten section occasionally scores a draw
by sacrificing all of her pieces and then walking into stalemate. Of course,
there is also the small problem of *recognizing* stalemate (knowing the rules,
again). I've seen tens of games where both players were in check for more
than 10 consecutive moves. Unless you've been there, you really don't know
the rich texture of sub-1000 chess.


Of course, watching games like that *is* painful.
But the mistake is in comparing their play to the
play of the adult 1500's at your club . In fact,
quite a lot of those sub-1000s are better players
than their parents, adult friends etc. I frequently
watch kids play with their parents. Guess what -
they miss checks, they leave pieces en prise,
they miss mates in one etc.

The one place where adults do seem to do better
is in "solving problems",i.e. things that could be
considered more "strategy". How do I win from
here? How do I mate with K+Q? But the kids
overcome that deficit by seeing the tactics on the
board better.