Chess: A Beginner’s Guide

Overview

This guide is for a good friend and everyone else who would like to discover the beauty of chess!I try to improve the guide over time, if you have any requests or questions please comment below. Chess rules[en.wikipedia.org]

Introduction

Chess is a great game in my opinion. Why is that? Anywhere you have a chess board you can play. It also very simple to learn the rules, but it takes years to become a master and it is only possible with hard work and talent.
One of the main reasons why it is different than other games is that is has nothing to do with luck. It’s just you being responsible for your actions.
As well you can play chess at any age. You can be really good at any age, from small kids up to some grandparents.
The thing I enjoy most aboout chess is being together with friends while playing and having fun challenging your mind.

The opening

The first moves in every chess game are called the opening.

There something important things to know before you get started.

• For comparing the pieces, there are points:
• Pawn: 1 point
• Knight: 3 points (can jump, but has only a short range)
• Bishop: 3 points (huge range, but controls only one square color)
• Rook: 5 points (long range)
• Queen: 9 points (most powerful piece, controls a lot of squares)
• King: most important piece

The center:
The four squares in the middle d4, e4 and d5, e5 are called center. The center is important, because you can reach any part of the field from there. So make sure to have the maximum control over the center.

Development:
It is important to activate all your pieces, so they can attack as complete army. Single pieces won’t have a great chance of attacking an entire army alone. I recommend to develop knights and bishops at the start, because they have less value than rooks and queen. Rooks and queen might be trapped and lost in the early game. As well there is the possiblity that they get hunted, so you have to move several times and you lose tempo.

King’s safety:
I recommend to castle after the basic development, to keep the kings save behind your own pawns. The best defense is still attacking to keep your opponent busy.

Mid-game

In the mid game there are two main ways to win:
1. You go for a king’s attack and if you’re successful, you win with a check mate.
2. You win some material and in the end game you get a new queen with a pawn.

The mid game has two main aspects, strategy and tactic. Strategy is a long term plan like on which side of the field you play, to use weak squares of your opponent and how to get a good pawn structure. Tactic are short combinations which have normally just win some material.

Some basic tips:

• Don’t be afraid of any opponent, everyone makes mistakes no matter how good they are.
• Always check every move of any knight, because they often have good possibilities of double attacks.
• Always check if there is any good check with which you can win anything.
• Think about the last move of your opponent, what did change? Is there a opened file now? What might be his plan…
• Try to find an active position for all your pieces! It’s really important!
• Try to attack! Make your opponent defending, try to scare him it’s an psychological advantage.
• Is there any unprotected piece? If there is there is a good chance that you can take it and take advantage out of it!

The most important thing is to always concentrate when you play and make sure that you watch the whole board. Which of your pieces are attacked? Are they protected? Is that exchange good or are you losing material? Just keep all the different posibilities in your mind and as long as don’t make any mistakes you have a good chance of winning.

End-game

So the end game is totally different than the mid and early game. Really small advantages make a huge difference if there aren’t many pieces anymore.
Also the king is getting a powerful combat unit. Normally there aren’t enough pieces anymore to become really dangerous for the king. But that meams also that you can’t win by checkmate as well. So the primary goal is to bring one of your pawns to the opponents last row, so you can replace it with any piece (normally queen).

Usually at he end of the game you have to checkmate with just your queen and your king or with 1-2 rook(s). So it’s important to practice these moves. The goal is to force the king to the border, but make sure you don’t stalemate him. It is painful to give away a win if you are so close to it.

Tactics

I’m going to go through some of the main tactics.
All tactics are like pictures… The pattern is always similar but almost never identical. It is important to know the most common tactics, otherwise you won’t know what to look for and it will be really difficult to avoid traps of your opponent.

1. Pinning

Here you see some examples:
– The black knight is pinned from the bishop to the king and not allowed to move
– The queen is pinned also to the king by the white rook, but she is allowed to move, she can capture the rook
– The white bishop is pinned as well, that’s why he isn’t allowed to take the black rook which gives check.

That’s a common situation in the opening. It looks like black is losing material. The knight on the square c6 is attacked by the pawn and not allowed to move due to the bishop on b5 which is pinning the knight to the king. But chess isn’t that simple. In this case, black can avoid losing a lot material by playing pawn to a6 and attacking the bishop which is pinning. If the pawn takes now the knight, black can take the bishop on b5 and doesn’t loose anything. If white takes the knight with the bishop, then the pawn on b7 retakes the with pawn takes the pawn on c6 and white only got a pawn (which isn’t a lot compared to piece).

2. Check and mate combinations

In this example you see two common ways to checkmate if someone castled. First there is the back row mate (just playing rook to c1). The king is trapped by his own pawns (to avoid this play pawn to h3 at a certain point, when you can’t think about any better move). The other one is to attack the pawns in front of the king twice, in this case the pawn on h2, and if the queen takes it’s checkmate as well.

Now you can see the most popular checkmate try in the opening. The idea is to use the weakness of the pawn f7 (f2 for white), which is only protected once by the king. The down side of this try is that you move your queen early. If your position isn’t great if your opponent pays attention. In this case white would check mate if it would be his/ her turn. But it is black to move and he has a few posibilities to avoid the checkmate. He can move the pawn to g6 and attack the queen. Also knight to h6 is possible, but there is the danger that it could be later captured by the dark squared bishop (if the d-pawn of white get moved) and last but not least the black queen can move to e7, in this case the own bishop on f8 is kind of trapped so probably pawn to g6 is the best move to go with. This checkmate is called “scholar`s mate”.

The last example is a bit more complicated and known as smothered checkmate. You could use a chess game to remake the moves, because it isn’t easy to imagine. The idea is to trap the king. So white plays knight to a6 with check. Black isn’t allowed to take the knight, because it is a double check. The queen on g6 is also giving check. If the kings moves to c8 the game is immediatly over because queen goes to c7 is covered by the knight and it is check mate. If the king goes to a8 then the queen is going to sacrefice herself by moving to b8 with check. The rook has to take, because she is still covered by the knight. And then the king is surrounded by his allied pieces and the knight just gives check on c7 and he has no square to go… Check mate!

3. Discovered attack

Here you see a common example for a discovered attack. The bishops are moving and the white king gets attacked by the rook. The goal is now to take any advantage out of this. But how? By attacking something. The bishop can move to f3 and attacks the queen, which will be lost because the king is attacked and needs to move.

Just try to find the same idea here. White’s turn.
The knight takes on f6 with check and the queen is lost due to rook on e1!

4. Double attack

A really common way to win material are double attacks. Here you can see some different ones:
– The knight is forking both black rook so only one can move and the other one is lost
– The black pawn on c5 is forking the white rooks
– And most power is a double attack with check, the white queen is giving check and attacking the bishop. But always be aware of your opponent’s possibilities. In this case the bishop can move back to h7 and block the check without being lost

Find the best move for white! Tip: Unportected pieces are always a weakness!
White can win material by moving his queen to a5 with check, because there is no way to defend the bishop on a6.

Strategy

Strategy seems to be much more diffcult to understand than tactics. Why is this? I think because it is more subtle. There is no “clear” advantage like winning any material. You have just the better position which forces your opponents pieces in more and more defense positions till he is unable to avoid the lose. There are weak squares where you can place your pieces activly. Make sure to fight for some open files for your rooks. That’s a really simple strategy and try to find work for all your pieces (otherways you could also take them off the field).
I’d like to show that with the help of some examples:

Here both sides have the same amount of material. But white is in a much better position, because his knight on d6 is a monster. He is really active and constantly attacking the bishop and the oawn on b7. So if black doesn’t want to loose material he can just keep playing king from d8 to d7 and back. Meanwhile the with king can strat getting active and helping the knight. He can enter the black base over the kings side (right side) and black is going to lose material then because when the white king reaches f6 or e7 the white knight can take the bishop, the black king retakes and the pawn on e6 will be unprotected and the game is lost because white won’t have any trouble to get a new queen.

Here is white again in a much better position. All his pieces working together controlling squares on the queen’s side (left) and they control a lot of squares there. Now white should try to open some files and enter the black base with the rooks. They’re especially on the 7th (for wblack 2th) row really effective. The light squared bishop and the rook on e8 arn’t doing anything helpful for black so he/she is kind of two pieces behind right now.

Conclusion

Thank you very much for reading this guide. I hope it helped you to improve your chess 🙂

I want to thank Wonderland who helped me a lot!
Thanks to Nafisa.t13 for the guide picture!

Finally I want to point out that it is always important to stay concentrated and to play patiently. Also make sure to keep your mind free. Every chess game is unique and every position is different. Never be so arrogant to think that you know the best move already (if there isn’t a checkmate or anything). Often times there are really weird and beautiful moves hidden!

Good luck with your future chess games!