I too suck at chess. I’ve played my father many times throughout my youth, always getting better, but never good enough to beat him. He always advised me to anticipate and plan out my moves several moves in advance.
However, I’ve never really learned what that means and now I’m too frustrated to ever try to figure it out.
Let me ask you a question.
Do you also have great difficulty with parallel parking? Some of us are just not good with spatial relations. It’s a brain/hardware problem. I’m pretty smart in general but throw in spatial issues and I’m lost. Never won a game of chess in my life. (and I know all about controlling the center- doesn’t help enough to overcome this disability.)
One really good way to learn the game is to learn it “backwards.” That is, learn how to win the game (how to properly use a material advantage to finish the game off), then work on learning how to win material advantage or winning positions (work on various themes of tactical “gotchas” for your opponent), and finally, learn opening theory, along with some rote openings (and eventually an opening repertoire). It’s almost impossible to do well with the beginning of the game, even if you’ve learned some simple opening game admonitions (don’t move the same piece twice, for example), if you have no idea why you are putting a given piece in a certain spot on the board.
Try to think ahead more than two moves.
I can parallel park (after some practice). But an interesting corollary to this: even though I’m an English major with a better-than-average vocabulary, I’m not very good at Scrabble. Something about that particular spatial challenge throws me off.
Read a book. Seriously. Find a book on chess “openings”. Learn the Nimzo-Indian, Queen’s gambit, Sicilian Defense, etc. Learn how the masters position their pieces. Your first 20 to 30 moves can be made from memory. You’ll also learn to recognize the moves of your opponent and will be able to respond properly. Why reinvent the wheel each time you play.
It’s been a long time since I first learned to play chess and I have no idea what books I read way back when or what’s available today. Try the library or
http://www.everymanchess.com/catsearch.php?area=Chess%20Openings%20Books
Good luck.
LOL
That’s because Scrabble is secretly a math game. It pretends to be a game about vocabulary but it’s actually all about graphing and probabilities.
That makes a lot of sense. I’m appalling at math.
This is possibly the worst advice you could ever give a beginner. It’s useless being booked all the way out to move 20 if you haven’t a clue what it’s all for; that just means you’re starting a game on move 21 that’s as meaningless to you as the initial position was. :smack:
Agreed. Malacandra knows what he’s talking about - not everyone in this thread does. Once you have reached a certain level in chess, studying openings (not learning them - you don’t need to do that until you’re a strong club player, which is the next level again) can be helpful as it teaches you the principles behind good opening strategy. But from the OP’s comments they are clearly not at that level yet. If you’re looking for “rules” to follow in the opening, try to position your pieces so that they attack the centre of the board rather than the edge (this is what people mean when they say “control the centre”), only move each piece once in the opening (in general - of course there are many exceptions), try to get your pieces out as quickly as possible (i.e. not the queen, and without making too many pawn moves), castle as quickly as possible. All these rules have exceptions but if you have to choose between two moves that look equally good, generally you would choose the one that does not violate one of these principles.
Chesscafe.com used to have a good column called “Novice Nook”, I don’t know if it’s still available as the site is blocked from work but I would highly recommend reading the archives of that if you can.
The idea of memorizing 30 moves is ridiculous since the OP’s opponents won’t be making predictable matching moves. OTOH I’ll stick by my earlier suggestion:
–Read a basic book (or online article) about openings. Learn the first three or four moves of the Queen’s Gambit, the Sicilian, the Ruy Lopez, the English and the Giuoco Piano.
Unless you’re playing someone with substantial opening knowledge you’ll start the game with a solid position to build on. You won’t agonize that you’re making an early mistake and eventually you’ll come to understand the logic behind those common, time-tested openings.
Other common chess wisdom:
In open positions and endgames, bishops are usually better than knights. In a locked-up position a secure, centrally located, knight can be more powerful than a rook.
I would buy a chess book for complete beginners. Usually, these books not only cover the bare rules of the game (how the pieces move, what a checkmate is etc.) but also the basics of tactics and strategy. Learn Chess by John Nunn has good reviews on Amazon.
Actually, we may still be going a bit too advanced. To the OP, do you know what we mean when we refer to the value of the pieces? Do you understand why they have those relative values?
Chess pieces are conventionally ranked with a number of points for each one. Roughly speaking, a pawn (being the weakest piece) is worth 1 point. Bishops and knights are more valuable: A bishop has a longer range, and usually has a larger number of moves available to it, but knights can reach any square of the board, and can often attack other pieces without being counterattacked. These roughly speaking balance out, and so bishops and knights are both considered to be worth about 3. Rooks have the long range of bishops, but can reach any square of the board, and additionally can produce an impenetrable “wall” that a king can’t get through, and so are worth 5 points. Queens, of course, are more valuable than rooks or bishops, and are considered to be worth 9 points. Kings don’t have any standard point value, since they mean the game: You could consider them to be worth an infinite number of points (or at least, a number larger than all the other pieces combined).
These point values don’t mean anything in the rules, of course, and different players might have slightly different valuations of them. But they’re handy in evaluating trades of pieces. For instance, if after the dust settles in a skirmish, you’ve lost a bishop and a couple of pawns, but you’ve taken out an enemy rook in the process, you’re about on par (one side or the other probably gained an advantage from the position, but that could go either way). If you have the opportunity to take out a rook at the cost of only a bishop and one pawn, though, you should almost always take that, since that’s taking out 5 points while losing only 4 (it could still be a bad idea in some circumstances, but only very rarely). And trading a bishop for a knight, or vice-versa, is usually an approximately equal trade.
Echoing everyone else’s sentiment: it’s all about looking ahead and thinking about your opponent reaction.
But to go a step further. I remember when I started playing chess, I would only think about how a single piece could attack. Like, how could I get my queen to take his knight? Or how can I get my rook in a certain position blah blah blah? The problem with this way of thinking is moves that are only thought out as an immediate reaction to the set up of the board are easily countered.
You have to start thinking about certain ‘units’ of pieces. I like to use my queen and knights in conjunction because the knights attack from unexpected angles while queens keep up the offensive pressure. Once you starting ‘seeing’ how multiple pieces can attack at once, you’ll start to develop general strategies.
A common trick would be to hide the advance of your rook behind a bishop, so when you move your bishop your rook’s lane of attack is opened up (ideally threatening an opponent’s piece) while also developing your bishop into (hopefully) a better position. It’s strategies like this that, to take steal a saying from Bill Hicks, squeegee your third eye, allowing you to see the potential of combining the moves of pieces into elaborate strategies.
This is very good advice; Novice Nook is an excellent series and is probably the right level for this question. It is still available on ChessCafe.com, with dozens of old articles archived.
You’ll get some good suggestions in this thread, but you’re probably better off to go through a bunch of those articles.
Wrong. You would be starting the game from a well established position. A position that a beginner might not have been able to establish on their own.
Since “Nonsuch” already knows the basic movement of the pieces and specifically asked how to put that knowledge INTO PRACTICE, I see no reason why he should not study the moves of the masters. Studying the commonly used openings would also allow him to better comprehend how to coordinate all of his pieces into a solid attack or defense. Why did Nimzo(witch) use a particular opening and how did he benefit from it would make for a good case study.
“Nonsuch” didn’t ask how to beat a particular opponent in a particular game but to understand the strategies involved in the game.
I’m glad the OP started this thread. I’m a poor chess player as well, after hundreds of games just getting to the point that I can provide a decent challenge to a regular player before I’m inevitably beaten. I rarely win, and if I do, it’s usually luck instead of strategy (I strategize and plan ahead, but usually my plan falls apart because the opponent does something unexpected). Personally, I think it would help me tremendously to memorize a few basic strategies, somewhat like knowing a few basic plays in a given sport would help a novice compete in pickup games with experienced players. If you understand the rules and movements, what could it hurt to memorize some common strategies?
It doesn’t hurt to know some common strategies. However, a distinction should be made between opening strategies and opening theory. It’s very useful to know the common types of plans in different situations, but it’s much less useful, especially at novice level, to know specific opening lines to any real depth.
Novice players should study basic opening strategy, basic middlegame strategy, basic endings, and lots of simple tactics.
There are useful articles on Wikipedia about tactics, strategy, openings, the middlegame and the endgame.