Easiest Chess Opening?

It all boils down to your style.  If good moves don't seem natural to you in the transition from opening to middlegame then you might want a new opening. 

Like how wearing clothes seems to not match the wearer sometimes (like rich white kids dressing "gangster") the opening must fit you.  Don't worry about preparing against a specific opponent.  Yes they may do poorly against the Caro-Kahn, but you might handle it poorly and therefore give them the full point. 

"What you need to teach them is the opening principles:

1. Control the center - e4-d4-e5-d5

2. Develop your minor pieces toward the center

3. Castle

4. Connect the rooks - move the queen"

I largely agree with this but some openings like the Fried Liver seem to throw it out the window so calculation matters too.  It's better not to enter such positions however and 3...Bc5 I'd recommend (like everyone did)

Agreed.Someone totally new to chess really doesn't need to memorize any openings.What would be useful would be to look at a few openings and understand why the moves that are played are good. I'm very new to chess myself and only rated about 1100. I have a good unserstanding of opening principles now and I do have a few openings memorozed about 10-12 moves deep for white and black, but at my level the book moves often don't even get that far.

So as "I am second said" opening principles first. It would be useful to know how to defend the common checkmate traps, especially those that attack f7.

Excellent advice by the greatone...The Fried Liver is crap if you know how to play against it, but it is also very effective if you dont.  As oogie said, this is when calculation becomes very important.

You can't just jump straight from learning how the pieces move to learning specific openings. Complete beginners are not going to understand opening theory; it's just going to be random moves to them and they won't understand why you're supposed to play such-and-such moves, and even if you tell them why (say you give a few moves of analysis and conclude, "then black loses a pawn" or "white ends up with weak doubled pawns") they are likely to respond with something like "so, what's the big deal about losing a pawn? It's only a pawn, they suck anyway" or, "what are doubled pawns?" Beginners that are even a little bit past the "just-knowing-how-the-pieces-move stage hang and lose minor pieces, even queens, without blinking an eye, whereas a player like you or me would resign immediately. But they don't care about losing pieces because when both players are making horrific blunders every other move, being a queen down is hardly a disadvantage, much less a pawn. First of all, you need to teach them the relative values of the pieces. Then you need to start with extremely basic exercises, like hanging pieces and mate-in-ones or even check-in-ones (I'm assuming they know about check and checkmate??), with very few pieces so it is less confusing, gradually adding more pieces to the board to make it more complicated. Then you should move to extremely basic tactics, such as super-basic pins, forks, skewers, back-rank mates, etc with only a few pieces on the board, and super-basic endgame wins like K+R+R vs K and K+Q vs K, and, when they master those, slightly harder ones like K+R vs K and K+P+P vs K. What advantage is being up a queen going to do you when you have no idea how to checkmate with it? And then after that, I would move on to basic opening principles like "develop your pieces," "control the center," and "get your king to safety (i.e. castling) and then basic strategic concepts like space/squares available to move to (you might introduce the "knight on the rim is dim" thing and show them how the knight doesn't have as many squares as one in the center of the board does), piece activity and really basic pawn structure, like isolated pawns  (explain that they are weak because they can't be defended by other pawns). Only now should you introduce basic opening lines, but stuff just like 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 and explain what each and every move accomplishes for both sides, and how this ties in to what you said earlier about developing pieces, defending pawns, controlling the center, attacking weak squares (i.e. f7) etc. Explain why these moves are played; don't just show them the moves. Now that you have covered everything I mentioned previously, they will actually understand this to some degree.

i'm no expert (or even amateur) in opening strategy and such but in my opinion (and experience with my own chess teacher), white's easiest openings are Spanish/Ruy Lopez, Italian, Queen's Gambit, and King's Indian Attack (I think that's the name, forgive if i mistranslated it from spanish). The first two are definitely my favourites, specially Italian. If you are going to make them play against each other or even other chess clubs you should really consider emphasizing on Italian, it's a really good starting attack for white, they could win a couple of matches easily with it if their opponents don't know the opening.

As for black, i just love the French opening. Just be sure to warn them about white's trap with the kingside bishop. I highly suggest French nevertheless. Other black openings? i know both Sicilian and Caro-Kann are really popular; though, i personally wouldn't recommend it for newbie players because they involve more strategic advantage than tactical positioning which is what you should start with when teaching new players.

Just ignore me lol and tech them whatever you feel like xD

I hate the french...

You were planning on teaching your students an opening that you hate? Well, that is just downright stupid.

Well that was one opening I could teach, it is easy to learn it's just boring for me... What advice do you have? 

Any idiot can tell you that teaching something that your don't enjoy is going to go badly. Teach something that doesn't bore you. What advice do I have? Are you serious? Have you not read the responses to your question?

I love this answer!  It is exactly why i started playing the French, and why it has proven so successful.

Keep in mind you don't want to create problems simple enough for the opponent to solve or get yourself in trouble by getting in over your head.  Let's say there's a bagger with a 180 IQ and his coworker has an 80 IQ.  Both will perform the same job just as well because baggging doesn't have problems that would justify that much intelligence.  Now let's say there's a lawyer with a 140 IQ and one with a 180 IQ, since no problems in law would merit needing a 180 IQ then Mr.180 and 140 would be able to solve the same problems. 

Now let's go into the realm of theoretical mathematics, suddenly Mr.180 can solve problems that Mr.140 cannot. 

Rating is to chess positions as IQ is to jobs, if you're an FM and some 1600 FIDE is your opponent then you don't want to enter positions simple enough for him to find the draw.  Now, by "simple" I don't mean endgames or strategic endgames but easy.  Some complex KID middlegames are easier than certain queen endgames where the danger to draw always looms and the win requires ludicrous amounts of calculation and carefulness and certainly wouldn't mix well with time trouble. 

Teach new players to use critical thinking by teaching them opening principles and having them learn to apply them in their games. It will help them a great deal more. People underestimate the power of just using opening principles correctly in lower level play and focusing all their time on tactics and end games. If your teaching new players, teach them end game play. Teach them different tactics that can happen in Chess, with puzzles to solve using them. They will get better much faster.

I have my answer thanks to everyone who commented, no more help needed for this forum*

The answer was The Ruy Lopez

Am I late? You decided? Well here is my input...

This is no brainer play them www.chesskid.com videos (btw it is chess.com sub-site). They go from basic principles to specific openings and sample games, how to play middlegame and and endgame. All fun and short.

RL is great but I would recommend to start with italian game. Direct attack on f7 is cool and easy to understand. (o there is whole series on chesskid about that). 

Just know on scholastic turnaments 1.e4 means sicilian defence. 

See you in nationals...

Are you sure he was talking about Chess?

Ouch, I was talking about the French Defense, not the French.