Beginners Guide to Chess

This is a quick guide to learning chess. I am assuming you know how the pieces move, but nothing else.

Overview of the game

"Play the opening like a book, the middlegame like a magician, and the endgame like a machine.” — Rudolph Spielmann

Chess can be broken down into three main segments — the opening, the middlegame, and the endgame.

• The opening

  There is no hard and fast rule as to how long the opening lasts, but my rough heuristic is that the opening is approximately 5 to 15 moves, and it ends when you stop being "in theory" — basically meaning the position on the board has not been written about or studied before. The opening is all about deciding what the personality or flavor of the game will look like — are you playing aggressively? Safely? Is it going to be a mad rush for pawns to promote to queens? A sharp, tactical battle? The decisions you make early on decide those characteristics.

• The middlegame

  Once you are "out of theory", the game becomes positional and tactical. Are there patterns you can recognize like forks, discoveries, or pins? (We'll get into what these mean below.) In short, the middle game is all about flexing your chess muscles and trying to gain advantages by seeing a few moves ahead, or by being a little more accurate in your tactics than your opponent. Many call the middlegame the most beautiful part of the game. It's where crazy "gambits" (sacrificing pieces) and genius ideas usually take place.

• The endgame

  The endgame starts when you have very few pieces left on the board. Usually the goal here is to use basic geometry to your advantage to try to create space for your own king, confine your opponent, and promote a pawn to eventually lead to a checkmate. People can calculate many moves ahead in the endgame because the branching factor is much lower (there are fewer possible variations.) That means that you need to be extremely accurate in your calculation here.

Basic Heuristics

It can be easy to get lost in chess and to want to win pieces or show dominance on the board. Remember, the real goal is to checkmate the opponent — not to win a piece. With that in mind, let's talk about the simplest ways to maximize the probability of checkmate.

1. Develop your pieces.

   Your "pieces", a confusing word that usually means your knights and bishops, are the subject of our first heuristic. In the early game, you'll want to "develop" the knights and bishops — meaning you want to get them to squares where they cover a large swath of the board, and pose a threat to the opponent. So, in the opening, if you have the choice between moving your queen and moving a bishop or knight, probably go with the latter. While queen moves in the early game look tempting, they are usually a bad move, because your opponent can often attack your queen and develop their own pieces at the same time, forcing you to be reactive, retreating your queen, and losing precious time to develop your own control of the board.

   If you look at famous openings (which we'll get into below) you'll notice that most of them go for rapid development of the pieces early. Remember, each move should not only move your piece to a more "active" square where it has more kinetic potential, but also pose an active threat to your opponent.

2. Tempo

   That concept of posing threats to your opponent brings me to the second basic heuristic — tempo. Tempo, meaning timing in italian, is one of the most effective tools for dominating in chess. In practical terms, it means that you are making moves, and your opponent is responding to your moves. If you feel reactive, your opponent has tempo. With those early queen moves for instance, your opponent probably has tempo, and it means that they are playing the game on their own terms, while you are simply reacting, retreating etc. It's not a good look. Good ways of "getting tempo" include checking your opponent, forcing them to respond to the check instead of driving their own initiative. In fact, it's not only checks, but actually any move in which there is an asymmetric threat — where your opponent would lose a piece of greater value than your own should a trade occur. We call this concept of asymmetric threat "risk levels." If your opponent is attacking you, you can defend by either moving your own pieces, or by creating an attack of a greater "risk" — i.e. they may be attacking your knight, but if you can follow up with attacking their queen, they need to move their queen and can't capture your knight for that turn.

3. Control the center

   The center four squares of the board (d4, d5, e4, e5) are the most important squares, because they offer the most "activity" — with a piece well placed on one of those squares, they can dominate the position. It is important in the opening to try to establish control of the center, usually via a pawn move like 1. e4 or d4 (for an introduction to chess notation, check here.

4. Castle

   Castling, the move O-O or O-O-O in algebraic notation, is when you swap your rook and your king on either the kingside (O-O) or queen side (O-O-O.) It is important to castle because it protects your king in the corner, making it harder for your opponent to checkmate you. It also lets you "connect your rooks", meaning your rooks are not blocked by any pieces in between. This really maximizes their power, because connected rooks are both attacking and defending each other.

How to study (for free)

With all of that in mind, how do you improve? There are some definitively right and wrong ways of improving at chess.

Wrong ways

• Playing against a computer

  Computers make unnatural, inhuman moves. That pawn move 5 turns ago? Actually setting up some crazy attack that no human could ever see. That's not useful to play against, because you'll never see the board the same way as a computer. You will not osmose their power. I repeat: you will not osmose their power. At the lower levels of computer play, they do not play solid, respectable moves — they either make 100% accurate moves, or total blunders. This is not how humans play. Playing a lower level computer will not help you learn the common mistakes humans make, and will not teach you the psychological component of chess, which is an important factor at any higher level of play.

• Playing blitz chess

  Blitz (quick, sub-5 minute games) is fun, but like weight lifting, it is maximizing lots of reps over form or "time under tension." You will not have time to think in these short games, and will not be able to practice the focus or analysis needed to really improve your understanding of an opening.

Right ways

• Play 15+5 games

  In chess notation, "x+y" games (like 15+5) mean that you start with X minutes on the clock, and then, each move you make, you get Y seconds added to your clock. Y is called the "increment." Games like 15+5 allow you time to think, and if time is getting short, you can always work your way back up by making faster moves. At this time control, you'll have time to reflect and do real analysis on your positions. It will also just make you respect the game more.

• Watch masters explain games

  I can't recommend this enough — I've learned so much from watching pros talk about positions. People like John Bartholomew (one of my favorite youtube channels) and GothamChess are accessible, funny, and really amazing communicators. They can elucidate what makes a position winning or losing, examine threats, and show you theoretical lines. Thinking like these guys is one of the best ways to rapidly improve your game.

• Use a chess database or another tool to examine and study openings. I recommend

  • Lichess studies
  • Chessable.com
  • 365chess.com

  The master use Chessbase but that shit is expensive and kind of a shithole visually. Don't do it.

• Use puzzles to study the middlegame and tactics

  Remember from earlier where I was describing the middle game as where "pins", "forks" and all those other bizarre words happen? I would HIGHLY recommend lichess's tactics page to learn these. In fact, the whole "study" tab of lichess is great for beginners to learn what the fuck I'm talking about.

• Analyze your own games

  After playing a game in lichess or chess.com, I would go into the analysis and use the computer to help you understand what moves were correct, which were "inaccuracies" (slightly bad), and which were "blunders" (f***ing terrible.) The rapid reinforcement loop that lichess and chess.com offer are bar none for rapid improvement and correction of your own errors.

  For a deep dive into how to use these tools, I recommend this video by GothamChess.

Getting to the next level

If you do it right and if you have like a reasonable proclivity for the game (contrary to some belief, not really an intelligence thing...more like an obsessiveness factor), the above can probably get you to around 2000 ELO (more on the ELO system here). If you want to improve beyond that, you'll need to take training more seriously. I recommend learning a lot about a few openings, preferably some with lots of gambits or tactics that most people wouldn't be familiar with. Examples include Petrov's defence (and the related Stafford Gambit) as black, and as white, for beginners I'd recommend the Scotch, and for more advanced players, Ruy Lopez or The (potentially delayed) Evans Gambit. Above 2000 ELO, people can begin to be described as "x players", where x = sicilian, london, e4, etc. Diving deep into a few openings will be the best bang for your buck and probably can get you to around 2200 or 2300 ELO with enough depth.

To dive deep into a certain positions, I'd recommend buying a course from a GM that goes into the various theoretical lines and helps you master (read: memorize) those variations. I highly recommend Eric Rosen on youtube if you want to get a more encyclopedic knowledge of more obscure gambits, openings, and variations. Chessable might be good for this too, but I don't have much experience with that.