The "Waiting for a Response to Your Text About Queen's Gambit" Quick-Start Chess Guide
Please don't start with openings.
I must say, I’ve been feeling like my chess knowledge isn’t a total waste of time now that chess sets are selling out and more people are professing interest for the game. I just sort of wish it happened when I actively played.
Anyhow, here is a short step-by-step guide from ‘complete beginner’ to ‘finding out chess is hard’:
Learn the moves
Self explanatory, really - can’t play without knowing the rules. Here is a resource to learn how the pieces move - I recommend doing the ‘chess pieces’ and ‘fundamentals’ lessons before moving on. (Make sure castling’s conditions on both sides and en passant are firmly ingrained in your brain - too many times I have seen people not understand en passant during a game itself.)
Learn some mates
I take a “green-to-tee” approach when I teach people the game myself. By this, I mean that I start with checkmates and the end game, then proceed through tactics, and only when a certain level of play is reached, touch the opening. At the beginner level itself, games mostly boil down to wide material discrepancies, so if you find yourself ahead on the count, yet unable to force checkmate, how are you supposed to end the game? Start with piece endgame checkmates (the most important one of this set being the rook mate) and then move on to simple pawn endgames and the opposition example. Thus, when you are up a pawn, you can make it a queen (or rook), and then proceed to end the game.
Play some games!
Get a feel for what an actual game looks like, and play a few games against actual players. (Bots, especially when restricted from playing above a certain level, tend to play extremely unnaturally and, as such, don’t resemble games that arise against another player at all.) Focus on keeping track of noticing when your opponent threatens material and protecting it/moving it out of the way, potential checks and captures to your opponent, and keeping count of material for both sides.
Learn some tactics
Tactics is a categorization of patterns that may arise in your games that help you win material or add pressure to your opponent’s position. As such, recognizing these opportunities when they arise is extremely important. Peruse through these motifs at your pleasure, but make sure to hit the following:
Capturing Defender
Clearance
Counting (simply keeping track of attackers and defenders of a certain piece of square is pretty much required to internalize)
Discovered Attack
Distraction
Double Check
Fork
Back-Rank Mate/Weak Back Rank
Overloading
Pin/Unpin
Skewer
X-ray
Zugzwang
Zwischenzug
Don’t worry if you don’t have them memorized, that’s what the tactics tab is for. Expect to get a lot of puzzles wrong until the system calibrates your level - after it does, chesstempo feels like the best site for tactics in my own personal usage.
Play a lot more games (and continue to do tactics puzzles)
Chess, at the end of the day, is a game about pattern recognition. From tactics to pawn structures to opening theory, recognizing a position is a precursor to knowing what to do next. As such, once the tactics and motifs are internalized, you start to notice things a few moves ahead of time, or a potential weak back rank or piece that can be targeted, and your play begins to improve. A key concept amidst making sure you’re not losing pieces or missing opportunities to win pieces is forcing moves: moves that require your opponent to immediately respond to them. These are mate threats, material threats, captures, and checks. Forcing moves are a direct application of the concept of initiative: a game state where you are directing the flow of the game, as opposed to reacting. As you blunder less material away and start to formulate plans of attack that aren’t just waiting for mistakes from your opponent, chess becomes about imposing your own vision of how the game should go on the board itself (as Bobby Fischer famously said, when asked about what he liked about chess, he replied “I like the moment when I crush another man’s ego.”) This is the true jumping off point for “actually” playing chess - formulating what you want to do while concurrently deducing what your opponent wants to do, and making sure what you want to do happens first.
The Opening Question
Without fail, every single student I have ever taught asked “what opening should I play?” when we played our first training game. The truth is, openings matter very little in a game between average players. Apart from a few famous opening traps like the Scholar's Mate (all of which you will figure out within a few times of encountering them), advantages out of the opening are usually nowhere near large enough for even moderately skilled players to exploit to control a game. I was known for being a terrible openings player (namely, I never wanted to study them, because I never found memorization fun), so I simply played general systems which didn’t require knowing more than a few critical opening lines. Examples include the Four Knights game and the Alapin for White, and the French defence and the Scandinavian defense for Black. Poke and prod around with what you see done in other games, but don’t spend a significant amount of your time worrying about opening theory. As I was told when ranking up, “get to 1800 then worry about openings.”
Some helpful books and resources
Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess (New, Beginner)
The classic - I myself learned to play from this book. It’s particularly nice because every puzzle includes a diagram, so you don’t even need to have a board on you to go through it (though I suppose we’re all stuck inside, so might as well use one)
The Amateur's Mind (Beginner-Intermediate)
A gentle introduction to strategic thinking and “how to think about playing chess” in a more structured manner other than “this looks nice”. A lot of the example situations in the book come from actual lessons and include the approximate ELO of the player whose thoughts are being broadcast and written about. Anything by Jeremy Silman is a fantastic read, honestly.
Pandolfini's Endgame Course (Beginner-Intermediate)
Though the internet has plenty of referential material, it is still nice to have a handy reference with hundreds of pages of endgames all in one place. Endgames, thankfully, can be practiced with a computer, so feel free to set up a board and play the position out against computers, as they have “tablebases” (read: hard-programmed endgame positions where they are told how to respond) so random moves aren’t a concern.
Assorted YouTube channels: I hear ChessNetwork and John Bartholomew recommended a lot, but thanks to the online chess boom of the past ~8 months, a lot of people I’ve known in some manner throughout the years now post a plethora of instructional content. And who knows, maybe I’ll return to posting some games…