Barclaycard Training Day

The first Teesside Barclaycard Training Day of 2016 took place today at Barclaycard House.

Tereza Pribanova, CSC National Coordinator for the Yes2Chess project, travelled down from London to make her first-ever visit to Teesside - to be met by....snow!

Weird weather aside, it was soon business as usual as we spent the day training new volunteers to work in our schools and providing a refresher course for last year's volunteers. 

The Ultimate Checkmate Challenge featured a lone king against an entire army of white pieces. Who can checkmate fastest...?

 Then it was down to solving some serious checkmate problems.

Mini-games are excellent for teaching newcomers to the world of chess. Here we see games of pawns vs. pawns in action.

White, to play (and going from left to right), can force a decisive breakthrough. Can you see it?

We went on to investigate most of the rest of the pieces, including the powerful queen.

Of course, any talk about the queen is incomplete without a little role-play.

According to Shakespeare, ''Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.'' The queens here don't look particularly uneasy. They must have strong Will power.

Bishop vs. three pawns is another valuable mini-game. Here we see David Mohan, the new Teesside Barclaycard chess organiser, making an early capture of a vital pawn.

The volunteers are ready! Watch out, schools!