How to Win at Chess – Part 2: Get Ahead and Stay Ahead

Get ahead and stay ahead.

For over a decade I ran the chess club at Colorado Springs Charter Academy, a K-8 charter school school I helped found back in 2004. My primary motivation in building the school was to create a better education for my kids and the broader community. But I always said (and it was always true) that at least 5% of my reason was to run the chess club there, which over time became the largest chess club in Colorado.

And while there, I distilled my message for how new players can win at chess. Turns out, it’s simple:

1. Get any material advantage. When you’re an enthusiastic beginner, material imbalances happen all the time. You can stumble into one or create one in your favor. Much of advanced chess is learning enough tactics to gain this advantage deliberately — and that’s the best reason to study tactics — but however you get ahead, you’ve accomplished step one.
2. Trade down to the endgame, translating your material advantage into at least a pawn advantage. If your only advantage is a pawn, make equal trades with all your pieces until that small one-point advantage looms as the only difference between your armies. There are nuances here. Make sure you don’t trade down to leave yourself with insufficient mating material, such as a lone knight or a rook pawn. But the principle is direct: magnify your advantage by removing otherwise equal forces.
3. Promote your pawn to a queen. Learn how to shepherd your lone pawn to promotion. This calls for understanding key endgame principles that arise when kings become dominant on the board. These principles have names. They can and should be learned on your path to becoming a well-rounded player. When you’re ready to incorporate them, these will be among the most straightforward and essential tools in your chessplayer’s toolkit.
4. Checkmate a lone king using only your king and queen. I see almost all beginners struggle with this. It’s why, if you’re new to our club, I’ll spend time with you to demonstrate “The Dance of Death” and “The Kiss of Death.” These are Q+K vs. K patterns that, once learned, grant you a superpower: the power of checkmate. When you know these patterns cold, you’ll never accidentally draw in these positions when you’ve earned the win. This superpower forces your win against Magnus, or Stockfish, or Fischer, or any chess god you might invoke. These patterns are the rock-solid foundation of certainty upon which you build chess endurance and resilience and growth. Start here, at reliable checkmate, and you build earned chess truth.

These steps have countless fine points, enabling the subtlety that has kept this game so compelling for hundreds of years. But at its core, the game of chess is simple: get ahead and use that advantage to make checkmate.

Start with that. 

Everything else is details.

Previous in the series – Part 1: Appreciate How to Lose.

Next in the series – Part 3: Play with a Bigger Army.

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