Restless Knights

In the opening

• Develop your pieces, the knights and bishops first (otherwise the knights will get restless!).

• Fight for the centre.

• Keep your king safe (this usually means castling).

• Don’t make unnecessary or too many pawn moves.

• Don’t move the same piece twice while the others are sitting undevelopped at home and just drinking tea! 

 

In the middle game

• Attack! Simply going for the enemy king is often the best way. Don’t forget that your opponent might be trying the same though!

• Mating attacks don’t always turn out successfully, so at least have a plan B ready. This might mean settling for trying to gain material (which will eventually lead to mate if all goes well) which is anyway more common in chess than a quick mate.

 

In the endgame

• Try to promote a pawn, which is to march it to the other end of the board and get a new queen (you can also choose a rook, bishop or a knight, but the queen is the strongest).

• Rooks are strongest behind pawns (and not in front of them or beside them).

 

In general

• Have a plan.

• Decide on your move before touching any piece.

• Never give away your pawns or pieces except in the case of a sound sacrifice.

• Trade pieces when you’re ahead in material (and avoid it when it’s the other way around).

• The Rule of Magnus (not named after MC): Have your pieces well protected. The flipside of this rule is to take advantage of it when your opponent doesn’t follow it. Games are frequently won and lost like this.

• Try to see your opponent’s plan – and stop it!

• Try to control as many squares as possible. This is why (except for the rooks, which are funny that way) having pieces close to the centre is better than having them on the edge of the board, they control more squares near and in the centre.

• Rooks want to be on open and half-open files. Open files are files with no pawns on them. We call a file half open if only your opponent has a pawn on it and you don’t. They’re also quite fond of the seventh rank (2nd rank for Black).

• Trade off your “bad” bishop if you can. If you have many pawns on the same colour and a bishop also on that colour, we call it bad (because the opposite coloured squares then lack protection).

• Try to get a knight to an outpost, they love that. This is a square protected by one of your pawns that can’t be attacked by an enemy pawn.

 

These are just a few things to think about when playing chess, but there are a lot more that a successful player has to constantly have in mind. Who said chess was easy? Well, it’s not, but it wouldn’t be much fun if it were, would it?