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Are you saying no game is relevant if there is a more difficult game (and that is assuming what you say is true or even provable)? And as someone who has played 100's of hours of both Starcraft and tournament chess, I can assure you that chess is much harder to master.

And just to throw around some unprovable opions, much like you, I declare that Starcraft becomes more a test of keyboard/mouse agility than strategy or tactics, because it has dominant strategies available for a master player.

Back to chess, I think it is actually entering a golden era of interest and popularity. The last 2 decades at the top level have been dominated by opening theory and computer assisted home preparation, which has made it a hard slog for the professional and spectator. However the last 5 years or so have seen the emergence of a new breed of player that is shunning that approach. The number one player in the world is a prime example of someone who doesn't focus on opening theory and computer assisted preparation, and he has been blowing everyone away.

Thanks!

Keep in mind I'm really, really, really far from a "complete beginner" in many ways. I already understand the rules of chess. I've played maybe 50 games of chess in my life, although I've lost nearly every one. I'm a teacher by profession and spend almost all my waking hours thinking about how people learn and implementing that in curriculum. I have a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, which means I've been trained academically to think abstractly and reason about formal systems (e.g., chess).

All this, and I was still incredibly confused bordering on frustrated! Now imagine someone who was really a complete beginner and doesn't have the ability to stop what they're doing and think, "Wait, maybe I should be thinking about this a different way. Let me look up some other information and see if I can relate it to what is happening in front of me." Plenty of students in that situation would instead think, "This is impossible. I can't even guess correctly. I'm terrible at chess."

I'd strongly encourage introducing some broad, strategic distinctions between the various pieces, e.g., long range vs. short range. Whatever is important -- I'm the beginner so I have no idea!

I'd also give better examples. You don't need to do anything complicated.

You want to illustrate "pinning." There are two components to this: the movement of a piece which created a "pinned" situation and the "pinned" situation itself. A novice chess player is told there is a pin, which means they'll look for pieces to move to create a pinning situation. A more expert chess player does the opposite: they evaluate the state of the board and realize that there is a possibility to pin.

So, the goal is really to help novices become better at seeing when it's possible to pin a piece. Imagine a picture like this (I'm going to describe it in words)...

You have a chess board with some "pinnable" situation. Let's take the one from the exercise which involves moving the bishop from f1 to b5. The picture would have the bishop in the b5 position. There would be an arrow emanating from the bishop at b5, going through the knight on c6, and ending at the king on e8. You'd somehow want to label each of the three points. Maybe put a tiny colored dot in each (R,G,B) or the like.

This is meant to represent the state of "bishop b5 pins knight c6 to king e8."

Then have a translucent bishop in f1 with a dotted border. There'd be an arrow with a dotted line pointing from the ghost bishop at f1 to the bishop in b5. This is meant to represent the movement of the bishop from f1 to b5.

Then, next to this image, you would list a bunch of statement which are true about this picture, interweaving chess jargon:

"The bishop pins the knight to the king."

"b5 bishop pins c6 knight to e8 king."

"Moving the bishop from f1 to b5 pinned c6 knight to e8 king."

"The e8 king is pinned by the c6 knight."

"The c6 knight is pinned to the e8 king."

etc. Just list out phrases and relate them to the image. Modify the image to emphasize the relationship in multiple ways (e.g., coloring the text to match the colors of the appropriate pieces you marked the board with).

Something like this would give me an opportunity to see pinning from every which angle. If one angle was easier for me to understand than the other, that'd be my "entrance point" and I'd then come to understand all the other angles by relating them to the one I really understand.

Also, keep in my that the above suggestions are coming from someone who knows almost nothing about chess. They may or may not be confusing to other novices in ways that I can't see. For example, they might introduce bad habits or ideas that I haven't considered because (as a beginner) I couldn't possibly anticipate them.

Yeah, I agree with this. No more gibbirish.

...And you can always win in weight lifting competitions if you use a forklift.

In many ways, Carlsen reminds me of my two favorite champions: Like Capablanca, he plays the opening and the middlegame "naturally", seemingly just following "common sense" positional principles - sure, backed by calculations, but not by home preparation. And, like Fischer, he clings to even the tiniest advantage (even if it is actually not good enough to win) until his opponent cracks down and makes a decisive mistake.