Chess does not blink. It does not send a notification. It does not call your child. The only people who can show a child why the game is worth loving are the ones already standing beside the board.
Published · ~12 min read
Three generations, one board
We went to the VII Festival "Szachy w Ustroniu łączą pokolenia" mostly for the coffee and the company. On the first day a FIDE-rated blitz tournament appeared — three minutes plus two seconds, no entry fee, air-conditioned hall. I called my brother. He came. So did his two sons.
Five people from one family sat down at the same event: my father, my brother and me, and the two nephews. I won the tournament and settled an old score with my brother from the Polish Entrepreneurs' Championship. The real story arrived later.
My father, who had never held a FIDE rating in his life, left the tournament with one. A man who came mainly because his sons and grandsons were playing walked away as a rated player. We returned home with a three-generation memory that no one can take from us.
Today my father and I run ChessboArt together. Two players with FIDE ratings, two generations still tied to the same game. That is not a marketing slogan. It is simply what happened.
What chess actually gives
Chess is friendships that last decades. It is travel to places you would never otherwise visit. It is intellect exercised in public. It is clean competition. It is the chance to sit across the board from people who later win Nobel Prizes or design algorithms that change the world.
Marcel Duchamp, who abandoned painting for the game, put it cleanly in 1956: "Chess is purer, socially, than painting, for you can't make money out of it." Demis Hassabis, the 2024 Nobel laureate in Chemistry and founder of DeepMind, reached master strength as a thirteen-year-old, with a rating of 2300. He has said that chess taught him how to think about thinking. Those are not small returns.
At the same time, not every child will love it. Predisposition matters. Desire matters. You cannot force a passion the way you can force piano practice or swimming lessons. The best you can do is make sure the child meets the game on its best day.
Chess teaches the purity of competition and the value of relationships formed in a very particular company. Who else counts Nobel laureates among the people who openly admit they play?
The quiet mistake I made with my own daughters
My daughters play chess better than most of their peers. They once competed in a tournament. They chose music schools instead. That is their right and their talent. Looking back, I asked them what I could have done better. Their answers were simple and hard to hear.
They knew they had no real chance against me. The games were either pure fun and nonsense where anything could happen, or serious chess where the result was already decided. Friends of mine used to say the same thing: never let a child win, it is bad for character. I now think that advice was wrong.
They did not want me to throw games or hand them free points. They wanted to know that an honest win was possible. Capablanca and Karpov both started by wanting to beat someone stronger. Most of the strong juniors I grew up with could, at some realistic horizon, beat their fathers. I never gave my daughters that horizon.
I was trying not to become the parent who stands over the board and invents a child's path. I had seen too many of those parents. In protecting them from pressure I also removed the possibility of genuine victory. That was my error.
What kids really want (and what they do not)
Children love traps. They love the sudden turn. They love beating a sibling or a friend more than they love the abstract beauty of the game. Teaching club groups like this one over the years, I've seen the same thing every single time: that early hunger for interaction, laughter and the chance to win is the fuel. You cannot train it out of them, and you should not try.
Later, when the same children grow up, many of the strongest players among my friends quietly stepped away. Their own children chose other paths. Planting a passion is a delicate art. The only reliable method I know is to create many low-pressure opportunities, to show the attractive side of the game, to let the child win fairly when the position allows it, and to play with other children far more often than with adults.
There is no ten-step guarantee. There is only the honest invitation.
What I'd actually do differently now:
- Leave a board out where it's visible, not tucked away for "lesson time."
- Make sure there's a real, honest path to winning — against you, a sibling, or another child — not just staged wins or hopeless losses.
- Let them set traps, and fall into a few of theirs on purpose — as long as they know the ones they win are real.
- Play with other kids more than with adults; peer competition pulls harder than any lesson.
- Step back from the board once the invitation has been made. The rest isn't yours to control.
Chess doesn't blink
Chess does not call a child. It does not flash. It does not send a push notification. It simply sits there — a wooden board, thirty-two pieces, a quiet geometry.
Someone has to open the door. Parents, grandparents, aunts, teachers, older friends. The game itself is patient to the point of indifference. That is both its strength and its difficulty in a world that competes for every second of a child's attention.
I never organised a lesson for my daughter or my nephew. The board was simply present. They found it. That is the scene I trust most.
How far is far enough?
Reaching the level of a FIDE Master is, in my view, one of the most profitable investments of time a young player can make. It gives a permanent mark of competence, a certain standing in any room where the game is known, and a way of thinking that transfers far beyond the sixty-four squares.
Even the old Polish first category is already enough to outplay 99% of the people who know the moves. Climb higher and the percentages become extreme. Becoming a Grandmaster is rarer than becoming a billionaire — there are more people with ten-figure net worth (roughly 2,700–3,000 worldwide) than living holders of the GM title (around 2,000). That is not a reason to stop. It is a reason to keep the goal realistic and the process joyful. If you want to know what that process should actually look like day to day, I wrote about the training side of this separately — why raw repetition isn't what gets a player there is worth reading alongside this one.
The real dividends arrive later: the ability to connect ideas that others keep separate, the friends you still work with twenty-five years after you first sat across a board at fifteen, the quiet advantage in a job interview when someone notices the title on your CV.
Why I still prefer the board in front of you
Online chess is useful. Engines are useful. I am not a romantic who pretends otherwise. But the version of the game that shaped me — and the version I still prefer — is the one played face to face, with a real clock, real pieces, and the small physical tension of two people sharing the same table.
From my own experience, that tension is real: my own heart rate has climbed into the 160s and 170s in critical positions, and I've watched it go well past 180 in others across the board from me — this isn't a rare exception, it happens often at that level of tension. You see the opponent's hand hesitate. You feel the room. None of that survives the screen. For a child discovering the game, those sensations matter more than any rating graph.
The only invitation that works
You cannot make a child love chess. You can only make sure the child meets the game at its most attractive: among friends, with a real chance of winning, without the weight of adult ambition sitting on the board.
Napoleon and Elon Musk both believed, at various points, that they understood the game better than they did. Many intelligent people do. The difference is that children notice when the adult across the table is not really playing, or is playing only to teach a lesson. They prefer the honest fight.
My father played one tournament with his sons and grandsons and left with a FIDE rating. My daughters chose music and still play better than most people they meet. Both outcomes are good. The only failure would have been to turn the board into a place of pressure instead of possibility.
Show the game. Leave the door open. Then step back far enough that the child can walk through it under their own power.
That is the entire method.
If this story resonates, the board is already waiting.
Explore the ChessboArt collectionFrequently asked questions
Should I let my child win at chess?
Not by faking it — kids can usually tell, and it isn't what they actually want. What helps more is making sure an honest, realistic win is somewhere within reach, so the game isn't only pure fun with no stakes or a contest they can never win.
What's the best age to introduce a child to chess?
There's no single right age. What matters more than timing is whether the child gets to discover the board on their own terms, with pieces visibly around and no pressure attached.
Is it worth aiming for a title like FIDE Master?
For a motivated junior, yes. FM is a genuinely rare, internationally recognized credential reachable through hard work and good training, without requiring the near-total obsession that IM or GM demand.
What if my child just isn't interested in chess?
That's a completely normal outcome and not a failure on anyone's part. Showing them the board fairly is the part that's in your hands — loving it is not.