The 5 Opening Principles You Need to Know - Calculation Part II

At one point or another, most of us have spent too much time in the early stages of our development, focusing on memorizing moves for specific opening lines.
It's understandable.

After all, if we know certain lines better than our opponents, gaining an advantage early in the game becomes much more manageable.

However, the problem with doing this too early in our chess career is that our opponents have too many options that won't follow the lines we've studied.

What will you do when they take an option you've never seen before?

You could hope that you're making the right moves.

Better yet, you can follow a set of guidelines to help you figure out which moves are most likely among the best in any given situation.

These are commonly referred to as opening principles, and anyone can use them with relative ease!

     1) Take control of the center.

     2) Develop your knights before your bishops.

     3) Move each piece once before moving the same piece twice.

     4) Castle your king and rook within the first ten moves.

     5) Connect your rooks so that they support and protect one another.

What do I mean by controlling the center?

I don't necessarily mean putting your pieces in the central squares.

Instead, use your pieces to ensure you can safely move them to the center in the middle game or, at the very least, prevent your opponent from placing their pieces there themselves.

You can learn more about why controlling the center is so important here.

Knights before bishops

This isn't a hard and fast rule. Still, I suggest waiting until you're around 1400 before switching up the order here.

Let's just say that you have to fully understand this fundamental rule before it's a good idea to break it. It may take hundreds of games (if not thousands) to grasp just how important (or unimportant) this rule is.

Trust me on this one for now, so we can get you to 1400+ as soon as possible.

Moving each piece once before moving a single piece twice 

Let's look at a couple of games.

In each scenario, the losing player moved the same piece before moving other pieces.

Even that one extra bishop move allowed black to formulate and execute an assault that took out white's most active piece for a pawn.

Let's look at one more that happens in my games frequently.

So this is a line I have pretty well prepared. You'll notice that multiple pieces were moved twice before moving all of the pieces once.

Why? It's because there is an exception to the rule!

If you can threaten a piece (especially by a weaker piece) or if you are threatened yourself, you may want to consider moving it again.

However if the position allows, it's often better to use a piece that hasn't been moved yet to address a situation so it can do more later in the game.

If you want to see why developing your pieces is so desperately important, here's a short article that can help.

Castle your king and rook in the first ten moves.

This is not the most important opening principle, but this is pure gold for beginners.🥇

Castling allows you to get your king out of the middle and to safety, firstly. However, it also allows you to connect your rooks (often) at the exact same time.

Therefore castling is usually really important, and trying to castle in the first ten moves can usually serve to help you have easier smoother games without thinking about it too much.

Connecting your rooks.

Rooks can be very strong pieces. After all, they can go forward and backwards in any direction.

However like queens, your rooks perform much better after most of the pieces have come off the board already.

Connecting your rooks allows them to protect one another in the opening and also gives them plenty of room to run from side to side when attacked.

If they can run away they can live to fight another day, or at least when they're better later in the game.

I know I promised I would give you the top five opening principles, but I lied...

As a bonus, here's the sixth opening principle you need to know!

#6 Don't bring your queen out early!

If you want to learn about how to punish your opponents for bringing their queen out too early, check out this article here.

These six opening principles are really the foundation for almost every solid opening.

Although there are times you should ignore them entirely. We discussed it in part one of this series When to Ignore Opening Principles - Calculation Part I.

It's about a one to two minute read if you're interested.

Or if you think you've mastered the opening fundamentals, check out the next piec in the calculation series, "What Do I Do After My Opening? - Calculation Part III."

Until next time, keep learning, keep improving, and most of all enjoy every moment!