Chess Strategy For Beginners

Chess is sometimes described as a game that is easy to learn but difficult to master. This article won't help you become a grandmaster, but it will offer you some basic strategies that every chess player should know, as well as resources you need to learn more.

We're going to assume you already know the rules, but if not, you can catch up with our Chess.com Lesson, Learn To Play. (Don't forget en passant!)

• Best Starting Strategies For Chess
• Easy Chess Strategies To Win
• Common Mistakes To Avoid
• Basic Endgame Strategies For Beginners
• Additional Resources
• Conclusion

Best Starting Strategy For Chess

The start of a chess game is called the opening. While it can be very complicated, beginners will do very well by remembering just three things:

• Develop your pieces,
• Control the center of the board,
• Get your king to safety, usually by castling.

Here's an example opening:

You can learn more in our Chess.com Lesson about opening principles and our Chess.com Course about the best moves to start a game. If you want to get in-depth about the first move for each side, check out this series of articles:

• Every First Move Ranked
• Every First Move For Black Ranked (1.e4)
• Every First Move For Black Ranked (1.d4)

What are easy chess strategies to win?

After you get out of the opening, there are no easy winning strategies. Chess is hard! But there are plenty of things that can help. The popular book by the late longtime Chess.com contributor IM Jeremy Silman, How To Reassess Your Chess, lists several elements to chess strategy, including:

• Minor Pieces – your bishops and knights
• Pawn Structure – how your pawns are positioned on the board and the squares they control
• Space – how much room you have to maneuver the pieces
• Material – the value of the pieces you have left on the board relative to your opponent
• Files and Squares – specific columns and squares on the board that can be weak or strong depending on who has more pieces and pawns controlling them
• Development – how many of your pieces are off of their starting squares
• The Initiative – whoever is controlling the flow of the game is said to have the "initiative"
• King Safety – ... how easily you can attack the opponent's king and your opponent can attack yours

Here we will focus on the two most important for beginner players: material and king safety.

Material is the most basic element of strategy. To count material, each piece has a general value. The better you get, the less important these numbers are, but here are the basic values:

• Queen: 9 points
• Rook: 5 points
• Bishop: 3 points
• Knight: 3 points
• Pawn: 1 point
• King: infinite! (checkmate ends the game)

What is more material: a queen and bishop, or two rooks and two knights? Count up each side, and you see the rooks and knights are worth 16 and the queen plus bishop 12. Having your queen doesn't always mean you are ahead in material! 

Winning material isn't easy, but it is the most common path to winning a game. Check this lesson out to learn ways you can capture pieces for free:

You may have noticed bishops and knights are worth about the same by material count. Don't be fooled, as they are very different pieces! Check out this Chess.com Course on the differences:

If one side has a 10-point material advantage, that player will very likely win in the long run—as long as they are not getting checkmated shortly. When material is equal, the game is usually still winnable for either side—as long as one is not checkmating the other.

You may have noticed by now how important checkmate is—once it happens, the game is over! That's why king safety is just as important, if not more, than material. The king is not very safe at the beginning of the game, as Scholar's Mate shows:

A castled king is almost always safer than a king in the middle of the board. That's why players just starting out are always advised to castle early in the game, ideally within the first 5-10 moves.

Common Mistakes To Avoid

Perhaps unsurprisingly, most common mistakes are the opposite of good strategy: not developing your pieces, letting opponents capture your pieces for free, not castling your king to safety.

Even though developing is a good thing, maybe the most famous beginner mistake is moving your queen too soon. While it is the most valuable piece, that also makes it vulnerable to attack.

Here's another opening example. 

Here's a famous position that shows what can happen when development and king safety are ignored even more egregiously. White is way behind in material, with just 15 points left compared to 25 for Black. Normally, this would be good for Black, but Black's king is in the middle of the board, and the rook and bishop are on their starting squares; White's king is castled safely, and the rook and bishop deliver checkmate!

Tactical Mistakes

While this is an article about strategy, it's tough to implement a correct strategy when making tactical errors. Tactics are the short-term moves that help chess players deliver immediately decisive checkmates and strategically winning material advantages. The four basic categories of tactics are as follows; click each one to read more:

• Pin (less valuable piece in front of more valuable piece on the same line)
• Skewer (more valuable piece in front of less valuable piece on the same line)
• Fork (one piece attacks two or more)
• Discovery (one piece moves, another attacks)

There is a fifth category that is called "hanging pieces"—simply not seeing when pieces are attacked. In fact, this tactic can be the biggest pitfall for beginners.

Basic Endgame Strategies For Beginners

The last stage of a game, where most of the pieces have been captured, and strategy changes somewhat, is called the endgame. Material becomes far more important and king safety less so. These changes are due to the simple fact that fewer pieces are on the board. If you take a queen off the board at the beginning of the game, that player will have a hard time, but there are more chances to survive than if it's just a king against a king and queen.

Even a single pawn can win in the endgame thanks to pawns' ability to promote. See our course, One Pawn Can Win It All, for tips on how to win with just a pawn:

At the same time, it's harder for the king to get checkmated in an endgame, so it is more important to keep your king active rather than safe.

Additional Resources

We've only begun to scratch the surface of chess strategy. Here's a course from CM Can Kabadayi that includes strategies and much more for players starting out:

Still looking for something even more basic, or just need a refresher? Here's IM Danny Rensch on Everything You Need To Know About Chess:

If you think you've got the strategy, learn how to finish the game with this course on Your First 10 Checkmates:

Conclusion

Now you have the information and resources to learn chess strategy and crush your opponents! 

Take more Chess.com Courses, play our computer bot personalities, or play another human online!