If you’re a proficient competitive chess player you’ll know what chess is. You don’t need me to tell you. But if you’re not, you may have some misapprehensions.

• Chess is a game for adults and older children. It’s not, in general, a game for younger children, for all sorts of reasons, although children aged 5-7 will usually have little difficulty in learning the moves of the pieces and will often develop a short-term fascination with the game. To play well requires a complex combination of cognitive skills. Sure, some very bright and mature children with proactive parents can excel at an early age, but these children are the exceptions, not the rule.
  
• There’s no evidence at all that chess has a unique and long-term effect on children’s academic performance. Yes, children who really enjoy chess, or who have lessons at school from a charismatic teacher, may well do better academically in the short-term, but these are essentially placebo effects.
  
• Chess is unique in many ways: its aesthetic beauty, its literature, its history, its heritage, its culture, its community. We should be promoting chess for its intrinsic, not its extrinsic values.
  
• Like all skill-based activities, chess requires a combination of generic skills, domain knowledge and domain skills. Domain knowledge is much more important in chess than in most skills, which is why regular study is essential to become a proficient player. If you only play once a week you won’t make much progress – but if you’re really passionate you’ll want to do chess every day.
  
• All children should have the opportunity to learn chess: children with chess-playing parents will learn at home. There’s little point in promoting chess widely within primary schools because the children will be too young to teach themselves. This should instead take place within the community, where parents will be more involved, and in secondary schools, where children who are interested can take the game further independently.
  
• My view is that many children start chess too young, are taught too much too quickly, and are encouraged to enter formal competitions before they are ready, either in terms of their emotional development or their chess knowledge. In addition, most children don’t need professional tuition: if they start at the right age they can teach themselves with a bit of friendly guidance. The Chess Heroes project is an attempt to do things better: to build clubs which will help more children develop a lifelong interest in chess and to write books which will help older children teach themselves.