How to Read the Chess Blog Posts

By Josh
You may be confused looking at my chess blog posts. You may wonder what 18. Nxf7!! means. In this blog post I'll be teaching you how to read my chess blog posts! First, I'll be breaking down 18. Nxf7!!.
18.
This is the number of moves there have been (so this would be move #18 for white and black has moved 17 times)
N
N is for Knight, so this is a knight moving. If it was a Q, it would be a queen moving. If it was a B, it would be a bishop. If it was R, it would be a Rook moving. If it was a K, it would be a king. If it is any lowercase letter, it is a pawn
x
x simply means that a piece is being captured
f7
f7 means that the knight landed on the square f7 if you don't know what I'm talking about, here's a picture an empty chess board with markings of squares.

image found here

In the beginning of the chess game, white's pieces are on the squares that have 1's and 2's on them and black's pieces are on the squares that have 7's and 8's. The f7 means that the knight is landing on the square that has f7 on it.

!!

The !! means that this is an absolutely SPECTACULAR move! One ! would mean that the move is a great one. A ? would mean that the move is a mistake. A ?? would mean that the move is absolutely TERRIBLE.

What do 0-0 and 0-0-0 mean?

0-0 means that the move is a king side castle. 0-0-0 means that the move is a queen side castle.

I hope you enjoy my other chess blog posts (now that you can read them)!

How to Do Well at Chess Tactics

By Josh
To start I'm going to tell you the three types of puzzle

• Checkmating
• Material Winning
• Avoiding Checkmate and/or Capture

The biggest thing in tactics is deciding what type of puzzle it is.
Checkmating
These are usually easy to find, but can be mistaken for material winning puzzles

This is an example of a checkmating puzzle that can be mistaken for a material winning puzzle. That mistake would be 1.Qxd4?? which would lose your queen after 1... Ba5+! 2. Ke7, Qxd4. Instead, the correct move is 1. Qg3! which will checkmate the opponents king after 1... Ke2, Ba6+ 2. Nb5, Bxb5#. Mate.
Material Winning
These puzzles are about giving yourself an edge by stealing pieces.

This is an easy tactic that probably won't give you many points. If you don't know what to do, the answer is 1. Ne3 which will take the queen in the next move.

Defense

I couldn't find any easy ones, so I went with one that even after completing the moves it still makes 0 sense to me. You can ALWAYS tell when a puzzle is about defense.

I have told you the biggest thing in chess tactics! Happy puzzling!

Potion Brewing in Minecraft

By Jeremiah the 6th grader

Potion brewing in minecraft is quite complicated, so I'm going to show you how to make a few easy to make potions.
First of course you are going to need 1 blaze rod
And 3 cobble (cobblestone) to make a Brewing Stand, and
 blaze powder
 
for the fuel. In order to make most potions you need to make an awkward potion, and in order to do that you are going to need nether wart and water bottles
1.Potion of Swiftness. add sugar➝
2.Potion of Poison, add spider eye ➝
3.Potion of Invisibility, add Golden carrot
➕ Fermented spider eye

=          
I hope this was helpful to all of you minecrafters out there!

Chess.com

By Josh
I almost never play chess in person because I have almost nobody to play it with. I have a few friends that play chess, but they're not always in the mood. I took up Chess.com mainly because I was starting to get to old for ChessKid, which is a part of Chess.com. I instantly noticed a change in the playing style. I also noticed there were a lot more things to do. The most popular timer on ChessKid was 15 minutes, where on Chess.com it is 3 minutes. There were analysers, which were completely alien to me. This is a very fun website, with over 17 million members on it! There is lots of stuff to do to help with your chess skills. The link for the website is here. If you want to you can also look at my profile, which is here, feel free.