Ruy Lopez: An Introduction

One chess opening is called the Ruy Lopez, and it looks like this. 

The above illustration is called the Ruy Lopez: Classical Variation. 

Many openings have continuations of them. From what I had observed from chessgames.com, this opening usually has two routes for white: 1) Advance to the middle from pawn to C4 or 2) Attack the Bishop from pawn to B4. Nevertheless, forks and castling can be used at different times during these two alternatives.

The main reason one would want to use this opening is to gain a pawn advantage in the centre. 

Here below is the first alternative for white's continuation of the Classical Variation of the Ruy Lopez:

The next example is white's second continuation of the Ruy Lopez:

I wish I could elaborate more on the Ruy Lopez, but due to my limited understanding of chess, I am unable to. More articles will soon follow.