Given that my daughter can barely tolerate sitting in the house for an hour because she gets antsy and starts begging to go to the park, I did not expect her to gravitate toward chess. She’s only 4, but she’s been watching her dad play chess at home for basically her entire life—and one day it caught her attention. Now, the two of them play at least a game every day on the computer; he lets her move the pieces with his mouse. To my surprise, my toddler is actually learning one of the most complex games on earth (though she still calls the knight the “unicorn”).
But if you were to ask Levy Rozman—chess champion, mastermind behind Gotham Chess where he recaps games to an astonishing 7.24 million subscribers, and author of How to Win at Chess: The Ultimate Guide for Beginners and Beyond—we could have started teaching her even earlier. When she was a baby, in fact.
Why a Chess Master Wrote a Chess Book for Babies
Rozman’s latest book, which was published earlier this month, is called Chess for Babies. It’s a high-contrast, soft book with pages that can’t be chewed or ripped. One page shows an illustration of each piece; the opposite page is an illustration of the chess board, with arrows pointing in the directions that a piece can move. Inspired by books like Quantum Physics for Babies, he wrote the book to be a child’s first introduction to the game.
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“The perception of chess is that it's an antiquated board game. It's associated with old men kind of pushing pieces at the park,” Rozman explains. “[And] I think there's some misconceptions about the learning curve, and how difficult it is, when in reality, it's just pattern recognition.”
It’s just not true that chess is only played by a select few phenomenally intelligent elites. After The Queen’s Gambit aired in 2020, interest in chess exploded exponentially—it's part of the reason Rozman's YouTube channel is so widely watched. And the people playing,…