Dear Dave, 
Hope this email finds you well. 
I’m looking for a coach to teach chess for my 7-year-old daughter. 
My friend recommended you, but I don’t know whether you are available or have available space for a beginner. 
Look forward to your reply.

Thanks for your interest.

I am available for coaching and have space, but I would not like to charge you money to teach a beginner.

Beginners mostly need practice, and some basic advice which is freely available.

If she has no opponents at home or at school, then I suggest you sign her up at ChessKid.com (a child-friendly place to play) or at lichess.org (an adult space, but you can turn off chat, so you can only say things to each other like ‘Good game’ and ‘Thank you’).  You can also get computer and ‘phone apps which play chess:
https://www.dadsuggests.com/home/best-chess-apps
The free level of ‘Play Magnus’ might amuse.  Some of the free chess apps like Stockfish are of Grandmaster strength, so watch out for that!

Beginners nearly always lose (or win) games because they miss (or spot) captures and simple tactics.
There are places where you can practise simple tactics for free, including lichess.org.
https://lichess.org/training
To learn what the simple tactics patterns are, you can refer to
https://devonjuniorchess.co.uk/content/middlegame-tactics-advice
https://devonjuniorchess.co.uk/content/course-chess-tactics
Someone made a video series out of that last collection:

And for defending:

Playing games and revising simple tactics are the most important things to start with.

She will also need to know how to finish off a game of chess:

And to start a game properly:
https://devonjuniorchess.co.uk/content/openings-advice

For more basic advice, try these resources:

https://www.chessinschools.co.uk/chess-at-home

and if modesty permits:
https://onionschess.co.uk/content/4-book-deal

If she does not like to read books, there are many videos on YouTube which are free.  I have made some myself, as you see.

I hope some of that is helpful.

For coaching, I charge £30 per hour, and for a month’s worth of lessons, I expect you can buy all the books your daughter might need for her first year or two of playing chess!

If she starts to play on lichess.org, let me know what her online name is (I am drdaveexeter), and I will be able to see her games, and I can tell you which bits of advice need more attention.

When I started writing books for juniors with Tim Onions, the first thing I did was go and learn Japanese Chess (Shogi) and Chinese Chess (Xiangchi), because I wanted to remember what it was like to be a beginner, trying to grapple with a complex game but with a limited conceptual armoury  (e.g. how does the horse move again?)

During lockdown, I’ve had a regular date with David Beckwith to play board games online.  We both like that category of game in which chess fits: abstract strategy games.  (You may be interested to learn that chess comes only 46th in the list of best abstract strategy games [or used to].)

We’ve been playing at boardspace.net, a rather wonderful achievement by David Dyer, who has created online versions of classic and newer games — I think there’s about a hundred there.  We started at A and worked our way through to Z, picking out ones we thought were promising, then went through A->Z again to see if we missed anything.  It was surprising how many games were decided because one or other of us forgot a rule!

So in the last 18 months I have tried to learn a LOT of new games, and I can roundly endorse what I read in the journal Games and Puzzles Design, by its editor in the first issue:

“Embed the rules.” (Cameron Browne)

“To ‘embed the rules’ means to use relevant features of the game’s physical components (board, pieces, environment, etc.), to enforce implicit rules which then do not need to be explicitly stated to players. This might also be described as
‘hiding the rules in the equipment’… “

This applies particularly when pieces have very different values or movement.   A nice example is from when I was battling with shogi.   There is a quite a barrier for the non-Japanese reader in getting to grips with the characters written on the pieces.

(Oliver Orschiedt‘s picture, used under CC)

I found a kids set, which had the moves written on the pieces, and the pieces of clearly different sizes:

Not obvious from the dismal photographs, but the pieces bear tick marks in the corners and on edges to show which directions they can move.

Another nice way of approaching the same goal with identically shaped and sized pieces was this one from Schmidt Games: the moves are painted on the pieces.

Inspired by these sets, I made insect-themed sets, for the full game and a simpler version Dobutsu Shogi:

Not perfect, the unpromoted yellow ladybirds on the third row up should really have only one spot. but they came with 4 and I didn’t bother to paint them out.  I was happy with the caterpillar promoting to butterfly!

And I found a symbol set, also very nice:

Got the idea?

So, I thought, wouldn’t it be great to have a way of teaching Western chess with a set where the rules were embedded?

Of course, I was late to the party: Bauhaus got there decades ago.

Kent Wang’s photo (shared under CC)

You can quibble about the King and Queen but I think that’s as close as you’re going to get to embedding the moves in the pieces.  And wouldn’t it be an easier game to learn if that was our standard set, and not the Staunton?

From Boardspace, games like Hive, Cookie Disco, Arimaa and Xiangchi were a miss on the Browne rule, while Mijnlieff was a definite hit.