Chess is having a moment. With the success of popular media depicting chess, like most recently the hit Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit, as well as popular livestreamers picking up the game and running with it, chess has surged in popularity over the last several months.
It doesn’t take much to learn the rules of chess.
Podcast Episode References:
Garry Kasparov Masterclass https://bit.ly/38DXYzM
'My System' by Aron Nimzowitschb https://amzn.to/3rNYPVZ
'Pawn Power in Chess' by Hans Kmoch https://amzn.to/38Bqu50
Chess.com Queen's Gambit Review http://bit.ly/3bJ02Zi
Even the trickier ones aren’t that complicated. Starting a game is easy: move some pawns, or get creative and send a knight leaping into the action right off the bat.
But after the first several moves, once the pawns have started their march to war and the knights and bishops have staked out territory in the center of the board, things get a lot messier.
Even a few moves into the opening of the game, and the complications and calculations are impossibly daunting in comparison with the pristine starting position. It is often at this point that beginning players blurt out, “I just don’t know what to do.”
This article won’t solve all your chess problems, but it will give a couple pointers so you can do some chess learning on your own in a way that isn’t just blind stumbling through opening videos on youtube and crushing blitz games all day.
Tools of the Trade
The good news is that doing well at chess is just like anything else: practicing good techniques will make you better and get you more wins. The challenge is knowing what those tools are. The way I see it, there are three basic categories of tools a good chess player needs to have:
Finding checkmate
Tactics
Strategy
Mastery of these topics will permanently boost any new player’s chess skill. Let’s break them down.
1. Checkmate: Just Win, Baby
The single most important concept in chess (aside from the rules, like how the pieces move) is checkmate. Checkmate occurs when a player has a pawn or piece (yes, they’re different) that is attacking the enemy king, and the king has nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
It’s the most important idea because, unless your opponent just decides to be a candy ass and quit, netting checkmate is the only way to win. It is also the only way to definitively lose, so knowing what checkmate looks like is just as important for defense as it is offense.
Beginning players know what check looks like, and they know that by law, a player whose king is in check must somehow get his king out of check. What a new player may not ever have consciously realized is that there are only three ways to escape checkmate:
Method 1: Move the king to a safe square – the most obvious method
Method 2: block check by putting another piece in the way. This is the hero’s way, of course. It’s important to note, you can’t use this method if a knight is checking the king, since the knight can just leap over the pieces Tractorcito-style
Method 3: capture the piece that’s putting the king in check. Most often, this is the ideal way to escape check, unless there’s some other tactic involved. We’ll get to that.
Even internalizing that knowledge can help a beginning player see new possibilities for getting the king out of a sticky situation. Rather than panic-moving the king all over the board and getting him into more danger, a player might realize that they can advance a pawn or station a knight in the way of check from a bishop.
This is especially important in the early middlegame if a player still hasn’t castled and doesn’t want to surrender the right to do so.
So how do you get better at finding and delivering checkmate? The key is to learn what characteristic checkmate patterns look like. Although it is rare to have two checkmates that look exactly alike, there are dozens of families of checkmate that players can learn to recognize on the field of battle.
Trying to describe all those patterns on a podcast would be stupid. So instead, we’re going to point you to some awesome resources to get some actual practice in.
One of the best books available out there (for people who still care about that kind of thing) is called The Art of the Checkmate by Georges Renaud and Victor Kahn.
This one is a classic, first published in 1947, and recently reprinted using modern algebraic notation instead of that classical bullshit that makes old chess books unreadable.
The book covers a huge number of checkmate patterns, describing the features of each pattern in detail (with pictures!) and giving the reader practice examples to work through. The benefit is that players who know what, for example, “smothered mate” looks like and see a king trapped in a corner surrounded by pieces might be able to find a way to land his knight on the right square and deliver a flashy finish. Or a player who learns what the Greek Gift sacrifice is might think twice about moving a kingside pawn after castling, saving himself an embarrassing defeat.
There are also abundant online resources for learning what checkmate looks like. Chess.com and lichess.org are two of the most popular free sites that offer some kind of tactics practice/puzzle solving element.
(Players can also pay for access to more resources and more practice; lame.)
Tactical puzzles with themes, like specific checkmate patterns, can help the player find the winning move from a realistic position and get in the practice of playing those moves.
During a game, a practiced player’s muscle memory will take over when all the elements of checkmate are brewing, and suddenly wins will appear where before there were only confusing positions.
2. Tactics: Building Blocks of Strategy
The second major element of chess skill is tactics. Tactics are sort of chess maneuvers that a player employs to gain some kind of immediate advantage, most often the gain of material, but also sometimes other things like positional gains—or even checkmate. Mastery of tactics is incredibly important and is really a lifelong chess skill, but nevertheless, it is possible for even the least experienced players to do. Just like checkmate, there are a variety of patterns and characteristics of the position that suggest when certain tactics should be employed.
The player looking to improve will need to know what those features are so s/he can make the right moves.
So what kinds of tactics are there? Turns out, there are tons, and some of them crop up a lot more often than others. Depending on whom you ask, some tactics are more worthwhile learning than others, but there are several that everyone needs to know. Here’s my suggested list:
- Double-attack/fork: a piece or pawn attacks two (or more) enemy pieces at once. It is not an exaggeration to say that the double-attack is the foundation of nearly all of chess strategy. The enemy is forced to choose between losing one piece or another if they are forked. Knights are the most powerful forking pieces because of their unique move pattern and the fact that they can jump over pieces that would otherwise interfere with the fork.
Pin: when a range piece (Q/B/R) is attacking a weaker piece that is in front of a stronger piece. For example, if a white rook is on a1 and there is a black queen on a8 and a black bishop on a2, the rook is pinning the bishop to the queen. If the bishop moves, the rook can take the queen—not good for black. Even more powerful is the “absolute pin,” where a piece is pinned to its king. Moving a piece in an absolute pin is actually illegal, so that player’s options are a bit more limited.
Skewer: literally a pin but the “pinned” piece is less valuable than the piece behind it. From our example, switch the queen and the bishop, and you have a queen skewered to a bishop. These are less forceful than pins, but the idea is similar and they can be quite powerful.
Piling on: adding an attacker to a weak pawn or pinned piece. This one is exactly what it sounds like. Piling on is most often paired with pins when a player is trying to drum up an attack.
Sacrifice: freely giving away a piece in order to achieve some objective, like positional improvement, winning more material than you gave up, or getting checkmate. This is often paired with check or with one of the other tactics in what is referred to as a “combination.” Combinations are like the touchdowns of chess: everyone loves watching them.
Discovery: a move that opens up an attack from another piece. This can be another form of double attack—if the piece that moves attacks an enemy unit, and if the piece behind the moved piece also has its eyes on a target, the opposing side again has to decide which loss to take. These are especially powerful when they involve a check, because the opponent has to deal with the check by rule.
There are dozens of others, some of which are more subtle, but they are worth learning. I recommend going to the sites like chess.com or lichess.org and trying out the tactics tools there, as they cover the gamut. As for books, there are genuinely thousands of books on tactics out there, and it really is hard to go wrong with any of them. My personal favorite is Chess Tactics for the Tournament Player by Sam Palatnik and Lev Alburt, but seriously eat your heart out.
3. Strategy: the Coolest Name for the Least Understood Concept
“I don’t really have a strategy, I just kind of go.” Stop that. You can do better.
The word “strategy” has a really sexy, game-theory-esque aura about it, but in chess it’s actually pretty simple. Strategy, generally, refers to operations in chess that a player uses to achieve a specific objective. Tactics are the tools of the trade, sure, but strategy itself
is really more about so-called “positional play.”
Beginning players often struggle to understand a position because they simply don’t know what a good position looks like. The good news is, you can easily figure it out. The key is to look for features of the position that are generally good or generally bad.
Some things in chess are, on balance, just good, like having two adjacent pawns in the center, having knights supported by pawns on safe squares, or having two bishops when your opponent has one or zero.
These are features of the board that may not lead to direct concrete consequences, like employment of a tactic or a checkmate combination, but simply having them will result in good things for you.
Some things are, generally, just bad, like having multiple pawns in the same file, having a bishop locked behind a wall of pawns, or having a king away from shelter, and if you have these, you might not lose right away, but they will cause problems for you as the game goes on.
Think about it this way: having Patrick Mahomes as your quarterback is just good because he is a good player, even if the game is tight and there isn’t a clear winner yet, and having Mitch Trubisky is just bad because he is an al dente noodle of a football player. The Chiefs don’t always win and the Bears don’t always lose, but most of the time things pan out like you’d expect.
This is, I think, the real key to getting better as a new player: learn what features of a chess position are good and bad, and strive to create good ones for yourself and bad ones for your opponent. I’ve listed a few examples of good and bad positional features here, but there are dozens more to know.
I recommend two books to learn more:
My System by Aron Nimzowitz, Arguably the most influential chess book of all time by undoubtedly the most influential chess opening theorist of all time.
Pawn Power in Chess by Hans Kmoch.
These books are good for giving you the vocabulary you need to talk about chess positions and figuring out who is actually winning, and they lay the foundations for figuring out what to do in specific scenarios. When you see a backward pawn, blockade its advance with a piece.
Get those rooks to the seventh rank and plant them on half-open files. See the position on the board and know what kinds of things you should try to do to take advantage.
Conclusion: There’s So Much More
Obviously this is far from a comprehensive breakdown of everything you need to become a good chess player. We didn’t even mention the endgame, and there’s the entire cornucopia of opening theory we barely even touched.
But the main takeaway should be that chess is possible to understand, and with even a basic grasp of checkmate, tactics, and strategy, you’re going to start winning a lot more games.
Maybe you won’t beat Beth Harmon, but at least you won’t have to get hooked on tranqs to move up in the chess world.