- Jun 19
- 3 min read
Howdy! It’s the Chess Friends!
The Man Benji is a man on a mission. The mission: to read every novel that features chess! Previously, we posted about chess-themed picture books and chess-themed non-fiction books.
Here are our first three picks for chess-themed middle grade novels, featuring girls, boys, and mice playing chess!
Always, Clementine, by Carlie Sorosiak (2022)
This novel is written as letters from the main character, Clementine, to her friend. Our review is written as a letter to you all, in the style of the book!
Dear Fellow Future Master Chess Friends,
Have you read this book yet? It’s about a superintelligent mouse Clementine, who escapes from a treacherous research lab. She finds humans—a boy and his grandpa—who take her under their wings. Just kidding, humans don’t have wings! They take her under their arms and teach her how to play chess. All Clementine has is five days to master chess and play the game of her life on a TV show: to prove that she is intelligent and to stop the lab workers from figuring out why!!! Chess saves lives. Read books and play chess!
Always,
The Chess Friends
Not an Easy Win, by Chrystal D. Gyles (2023)
The main character Lawrence likes chess, and music in his headphones. Here is a review with a beat.
Life is tough for Lawrence; he fights a lot. Not cool.
Lawrence gets in fights so much that he’s expelled from school!
He spends his time at rec, but fights there too, the fool.
Because the others baited him and used him as a tool!
Then Lawrence learns the game of chess and its important rule:
Think twice before you do something to check if it’s uncool.
Soon Lawrence and the gang go to a tourney by carpool.
There, among those people, he's like a molecule.
Right before the chess games start, there is a big whirlpool.
But all is good, lessons are learned, and now it's time to duel!
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Rhymes aside, I really liked getting to know Lawrence, and I liked his voice, and how chess helped him to find his people and himself. Find your own beat and play chess!
May the Best Player Win, by Kyla Zhao (2024)
This book is about May, a 7th-grade chess girl. (May and May the Best Player Win—get it? The book is full of such puns. If you know me, I like a good knee-slapper!)
May won the Judit Polgar Girl’s award at a local state chess championship, and her school team qualified for Nationals. Now she wants to win her school mini-chess tournament to become the team captain. But some think that she is not good enough to be the captain, and that all of this buzz around May is only because she is a girl. How dare they?!
Now May has to prove that she’s good at chess. The pressure is mounting on May: should May drop everything and train to win no matter what? Does she even have time to hang out with her friends? Soon, she feels like an overloaded chess piece, one that is defending too many things at once. Chess is becoming no fun anymore! How will she solve her problems? Be a good friend and play chess!
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That’s all for now. Read books and play chess! Let us know what other chess books you would like us to feature!
Three Cheers, Fellow Future Master Chess Friends!
The Man Benji, The Myth Sarang, and The Legend Vivi
- Jun 12
- 4 min read
Howdy! It’s the Chess Friends!
Today we are going to share two of the coolest math problems in chess, The Eight Queens Puzzle and The Knight's Tour. We all love math, almost as much as we love chess, so these are particularly special.
The Eight Queens Puzzle
The goal of this puzzle is to place eight queens on the 8 x 8 chessboard so that none of them threaten one another, meaning that they are each on a different row, different column, and different diagonal.
This puzzle was created by German chess composer Max Freidrich William Bezzel in 1848, and there are now variations that extend this puzzle to smaller and larger board sizes, like place 7 queens on the 7 x 7 chess board, or 9 queens for 9 x 9 board. Believe it or not, there are 92 solutions to this 8 x 8 problem, and only one that is symmetrical. Can you find any? How about the symmetrical one?
We would like to show you some examples here, to set you on the right track. Here is a solution we came up with to the five queens puzzle on a 5 x 5 board.
Here is a solution we created on a 9 x 9 board with 9 queens!
Do you notice anything interesting about the queens? Many of them are a knights jump away from one another! Why do you think so? We think that if they’re a knights jump away from each other, they’re not touching and they’re on different ranks, files, and diagonals, which is the goal!
The Knight’s Tour
The Knight’s Tour is a puzzle. The goal is for a knight is to go to every square on a chessboard without repeating a square.
This problem was created around 800AD by Indian poet Rudrata. We have a painting of the Knight’s Tour in our living room, by local artist Jayashree Krishnan! In particular, there are two poems from the Paduka Sahasram, which is a collection of 1008 poems written in the 12th century by Vedanta Desikan. Note that the Sanskrit characters to start each move of the tour are painted on each square.
This problem becomes even more difficult if we want to do a closed Knight’s Tour meaning the Knight must return to its home square so if you want an even greater challenge, give it a go! Believe it or not, if you include transformations like reflections and rotations, there are 26,534,728,821,064 closed Knight’s Tours!
Extending this problem to boards of different sizes is a famous problem not only in math, but in computer science as well. We would love for you to play with it and try to solve the 8 x 8 case, that is move the knight to all 64 squares without repeating a square but we’ll give you a few tips here.
One neat trick to solving this problem is Warnsdorf’s rule, which says the knight should always move to the square with the least number of possible moves after that you haven't yet visited. Here’s an example:
Suppose the knight is on b4 as you can see above. There are six squares it can go to: a6, a2, c6, c2, d5, and d3. If it goes to c6, d5, or d3, it has 7 squares it could then go to without returning to b4. We can do better! If we go to c2, there are only five squares the knight can go without returning to b4. Better but not the best. How about a6? From a6 we can go to b8, c7 or c5, so only 3 options. Pretty good! What about a2? I think we have a winner! The only squares the knight can go from there are c3 and c1, so since there are only 2 options, we choose that as our next move. Note that this is an algorithm, or a method we can follow to get us to a solution. Sometimes the fun is in playing and experimenting yourself, but we wanted to share this in case you wanted a process to follow.
Here is a full solution to the Knight’s Tour on a 5 x 5 board:
The Magic Square Knight’s Tour
There is a special case of the Knight’s Tour where the numbered sequence of moves forms a Magic Square. A Magic Square is a square with distinct positive whole numbers on each square such that each row and each column has the same sum.
Here’s an example of one of ours from elementary school! Fun fact: The Man’s Halloween costume in 2nd grade was a knight on a Magic Square Tour!! Like most math problems, Magic Squares have extensions too, and one of those is where the diagonals also add up to the same number!
We’ll leave these here for now friends. We hope you learned a little bit and have some tools to experiment with these awesome chess math puzzles. Good luck! Feel free to share your solutions and thoughts in the comments! Do math! Play chess!
Three Cheers, Fellow Future Master Chess Friends!
The Man Benji, The Myth Sarang, and The Legend Vivi
- Jun 5
- 2 min read
Howdy! It's the Chess Friends!
Today we're going to play a game of Would you rather? with The Chess Friends! Remember The Man is Benji, The Myth is Sarang, and The Legend is Vivi. Let's dive in!
WOULD YOU RATHER...
Play White or Black?
Man: White Myth: White
Legend: Black
Play Blitz or Classical?
Man: Blitz
Myth: Classical
Legend: Blitz
Play Bughouse or Bullet?
Man: Bughouse
Myth: Bullet
Legend: Bullet
Play Over the Board (OTB) or Online?
Man: OTB
Myth: OTB
Legend: OTB
Play Magnus or Gukesh?
Man: Magnus
Myth: Magnus
Legend: Gukesh
Become a Chess Streamer or Chess Grandmaster?
Man: GM
Myth: Streamer
Legend: GM
Play chess or study chess?
Man: Play
Myth: Study
Legend: Play
Never run out of time or have infinite opening knowledge?
Man: Infinite opening knowledge
Myth: Infinite opening knowledge
Legend: Infinite opening knowledge
Play a tournament locally or travel to a tournament?
Man: Travel
Myth: Travel
Legend: Local
Get 3/6 playing up every round or 6/6 playing down every round?
Man: 6/6
Myth: 3/6
Legend: 3/6
Open e4 or d4?
Man: e4
Myth: e4
Legend: d4
Greek gift or Botez gambit?
Man: Greek gift
Myth: Greek gift
Legend: Botez gambit
Win a Middlegame or Endgame?
Man: Endgame
Myth: Endgame
Legend: Middlegame
Play a Gambit or No Gambit?
Man: No Gambit
Myth: No Gambit
Legend: Gambit
Play a morning round or evening round?
Man: Morning
Myth: Evening
Legend: Morning
Castle Kingside or Queenside?
Man: Queenside
Myth: Kingside
Legend: Kingside
Use Pawns or Pieces?
Man: Pieces
Myth: Pawns
Legend: Pawns
Play Kids or Adults?
Man: Adults
Myth: Adults
Legend: Adults
Attack or Defend?
Man: Attack
Myth: Attack
Legend: Attack
Play a brilliant move or have 99% accuracy?
Man: Brilliancy
Myth: 99%
Legend: Brilliancy
Play the Hippo or the Cow?
Man: Hippo
Myth: Hippo
Legend: Cow
Write about Chess or read about Chess?
Man: Read
Myth: Write
Legend: Write
How would you answer these questions? Let us know in the comments! Note that both is not an option nor is neither! It's tough! Good luck!
Three Cheers, Fellow Future Master Chess Friends!
The Man Benji, The Myth Sarang, and The Legend Vivi