To win at chess, you need to be constantly thinking a few moves in advance, setting up longer, more complicated attacks to outfox your opponent. Your first move is about setting up the rest of the game, leading to your first attack or controlling certain sections of the board.
Because of the forced capture rule, losing chess games often involve long sequences of forced captures by one player. This means that a minor mistake can doom a game. Such mistakes can be made from the very first move—it is currently known that a Black win can be forced after 13 of White's 20 legal opening moves.
The best opening moves (and most popular) in a game of chess are 1. e4 (the King's Pawn Opening), 1. d4 (the Queen's Pawn Opening), 1. Nf3 (the Réti Opening), 1.
Strategy. Of the twenty possible first moves in chess, author and grandmaster Edmar Mednis argues that 1. f3 is the worst. Grandmaster Benjamin Finegold teaches "Never play f3".
When your opponent has only one problem to take care of, he can use all of his resources to defend that area, while if you create another front of attack, a second weakness, his resources become less efficient and his position will quickly deteriorate. That's how it works.
Even the best players in the world lose. Play enough games and losing is unavoidable. Since losing games is inevitable, learning from losses is important. No matter how you lose a game, you can learn something from it — otherwise, you wouldn't have lost.
Don't boast, talk trash, or try to intimidate your opponent.
Some players brag about their ratings, comment on their opponents' ratings, or play psychological games (“I played a guy last month with a rating like yours and blew him away.”) Don't. Do not say anything that may offend your opponent.
Not just with chess, but lots of things, when you study at first you may get a little worse as you try to incorporate new knowledge and use different ways of thinking. After that you get better though. Also improvement tends to happen in spurts. You don't get a little better every day.
It's usually either because you're trying to apply new concepts to your games but don't fully understand them, in which case you should have a "sudden" perfomance and rating increase after a few games of learning to apply the concepts. Or it's just a chess burn out, or coming back from a long break.
It is somewhat true that the more intelligent kids tend to gravitate towards chess. But modern research has shown that it does not matter if a child has been previously exposed to chess, and only four months of chess training can significantly increase their overall IQ.
Chess Rule #1: Touch move
We cannot emphasise how essential it is. Games are won and lost at a stroke with this rule. So here goes… the rule states that when a chess player intentionally touches one of his pieces, he or she must make a move with this piece (of course, if there is a legal move available).
Controlling the center is by far one of the most important chess strategies you can think of. Many beginners don't realize what's so important about controlling the 4 central squares: e4, d4, e5, and d5. In reality whoever controls these magic squares controls the game.
If chess is a program with the aim to devise all possible combinations and their definite answer, then the possibilities are too many to count and analyze, and there is no way to solve chess yet. Basically, the 'solution' to chess is that there is no one solution, and there will never be only one solution.
The queen is known as the most powerful piece on the chess board, so the prospect of sacrificing it invokes an unparalleled excitement among chess enthusiasts. There is something inherently satisfying about giving up the strongest piece on the board in order to checkmate the enemy king.
Pawn is the weakest piece on the chessboard, it is worth one point (1 point = 1 pawn).
Over the course of a career, most players were found to peak at age 30, maintaining that performance for approximately 10 years before their play began to deteriorate. Similar to age, the authors also found a similar hump-shaped performance curve for experience.