When i can't come up with candidate moves to list it helps to look thru this list.
Chess tips
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I'm afraid that to me it most resembles a bunch of household hints, J, and has far too many broad generalisations in many areas. I think it would be a lot more useful arranged in brief sections (opening: middle game, general tactics, general strategies, endings) rather than in numbered points, because it needs to be readable. There are also quite a few "principles" that have a large "it depends" component which goes unstated: for example, it is dicey to make too many generalisations about controlling the centre by a fixed order of development when so-called hypermodern openings break many of the rules. Another example: queenside castling, rather frowned upon in these principles, is the best move in several lines of the Sicilian, particularly in Dragon variations.
I also get annoyed by what are really counsels of perfection, like a couple that suggest that you control the centre – as if your opponent wouldn't have precisely the same idea :-).
Okay, I am being curmudgeonly in top gear, but a list of tips like this is a lousy substitute for book knowledge. But maybe I have been around too long and this stuff might help the less experienced players. I do think it could be better organised into something more readable and that there should be caveats so that generalisations do not acquire the status of some kind of additional rules of play.
If I had time I would go into more specific things, but one thing does come to mind: the most useful thing I ever found was an explanation of the notions of development and tempo, together with a clear statement that chess is a game about time and space. I didn't see that here.
Cheers,
Oscar the Grouch
PS I probably written this upon the day I started playing chess 960 for the first time in more than 18 months. It is doing my head in!
thank you for your very valuable input dave
i will produce a revised list with fewer repetitions and less generalization
and better organization
also i will do some googling and try to learn what is meant by hyper modern opening
muchas gracias
I would really like to see what other people think, J. I reckon I have too much time on my hands, sometimes! Many years ago I was pretty well read in the history and development of chess, even though I can't pretend to have kept up (I would only be about 30 years behind!), and that definitely colours my views – along with an active dislike of the American habit of putting distilled wisdom into numbered lists (Seven Secrets You Must Know about Dealing with Difficult People, that sort of thing which was rife in management courses when I was a bureaucrat).
other people may react quite differently, so I guess I would be uncomfortable if you don't have the benefit of other contributors. (I hope I didn't frighten them away :-).)
Cheers,
Dave
I learned chess in a very rudimentary way at 14, and began to learn it in a more systematic fashion when I hit 30. The 'motto' behind that learning might have been "Play by principles." Such as the ones on this list (I don't think I could have dealt with 96 though!)
I discovered there was a basic problem with this approach: the clearcut application of these principles is rare. Only when you transition into an endgame is their relevance clear, like activating the K, rook behind passed pawn, etc. And even then those principles are far better described -- and in some context -- by authorities like Capablanca and Shereshevsky. Dave is right:there is no substitute for book learning.
For most of the game - opening and middlegame - the relevance of such nostrums and how to apply them is cloudy at best, mainly due to the fact that principles clash with one another - and the opponent has something to say about whether you can apply them at all!
They are no better than rough -very rough - guidelines, applicable or not based solely on CONCRETE ANALYSES OF GAME POSITIONS.
Avoid pawn weaknesses, like doubletons or isolani? Trying to do so will give you some pretty tortured positions! They may be an ENDGAME liability, but not so in the MIDDLEGAME (see remark above!).
Castling O-O is better than O-O-O? Who said so? IT DEPENDS ON A CONCRETE EVALUATION OF THE POSITION.
I could go on about items on the list. But the point is I never started to get anywhere in chess at all (out of a USCF-1100/1200 rut) until I stopped playing that way.
In the '90s I got active in school chess and basic chess instruction. My model basic 'textbooks' became Lev Alburt's COMPREHENSIVE CHESS COURSE and Lazslo Polgar's CHESS (He's the father of the sisters). More about that approach to teaching basics in another instalment.
This doesn't mean your list has no value - there's lots of good advice there.
On a more positive note, there is room for principles - "tips" if you will; reminders; guidelines - in chess. Elements. They apply to how chess is learned as well as how it is played. Note that good chess learning always involves the examination of concrete positions.
The first element - and to my mind an essential one but often ignored -- is to be thoroughly familiar with the chessboard and how the pieces function on it. A shorthand term for this is "sight of the board." Until the last 20 years or so, American chess teaching neglected this, assuming that some gifted players had "quick sight of the board," and letting it go at that. The Soviets did not. Russian emigre Lev Alburt opened my eyes to it in his Comprehensive Chess Course. [I was 50 before I brought this kind of 'training' to my own game; too late in life to be fully effective; this kind of knowledge - in any field - is best learned before age 15. But it still helped.]
For my own students in the '90s, this training involved learning the color of every square on the chessboard, and the squares of every diagonal, 'blindfold.' It also involved learning how the pieces functioned at different places on the board - specifically, the Center, the edge, and a corner. The simple question: How many squares can each piece reach from these spots?
A valuable adjunct to this is practicing different "knight's tours."
But the most valuable and practical training in board-sight is the STUDY OF PRACTICAL ENDGAMES. It begins with the Basic mates. No better way to grasp how pieces function on the board than learning, first, Q +K and R + K, and then soon, 2B+K and (yes!) B+N+K
Practice with knight endings and queen endings are particularly important (queen endings are difficult precisely because of how many squares she can control). The ending of Q vs. R is a valuable exercise, and lots of fun when you master it.
It is from this basic principle or element that many of the "tips" on the list are derived, like those on the center, development of pieces, etc. But without this knowledge those tips would be only abstractions.
Another way to describe this principle or element is THE ELEMENT OF SPACE.
[Next: the principle of FORCING MOVES. In other words TIME; which Gentle Reader, embraces the disciplines of TACTICS and of BLUNDER-CHECKING.]
Jam - the term "hypermodern opening" refers to the idea of controlling the center, not by occupying it, but from a distance (e.g., influence of fianchettoed bishops), and/or the strategy of allowing the opponent to develop a big center in order to attack it. Eg, Nimzo-Indian, Gruenfeld, Pirc/Modern Defenses; Reti Opening, Larsen's Opening. Reti famously quipped that, after 1. e4, "White's game is in it's death throes." The term "hypermodern" was apparently coined by Savielly Tartakower, one of the great wits of chess, as a jibe at Nimzovitch and the new-fangled ideas.
[Incidentally, I meant to mention the features on this site that make the kind of learning (or re-learning!) talked about in the previous post fairly painless compared to the laborious 'book-learning' from back in the day. Those are the VIDEOS and CHESS MENTOR courses (Forget the ridiculous 'rating system' for that!). The videos are usually pretty entertaining, and certainly an improvement over most TV. I particularly like the ones on rook endings, the queen vs. rook ending. There was recently a series on opposite colored bishops that's a really good lesson on how pieces interact with features of the chessboard.]
The second principle or element is sometimes referred to by one of those meaningless-without-concrete-context abstractions like "space," in this case TIME. I prefer to call it the principle of FORCING MOVES.
Forcing moves, in priority order, are (1) checks, (2) captures, (3) attacks - or threats to cature material, starting, naturally, with threats to the queen.
These are also called tempo moves. If you check your opponent's K he is forced to respond to the check: you gain time, or a tempo.
Most games between players under a certain rating (approx. USCF 17-1800) are decided by blunders, either immediate game-enders (losing a queen) or game-changers (losing an exchange or a pawn).
I was surprised to find out how often this is true even in "online" games! Shocked at my own stupid floozles!
Blunder-checking is the discipline of examining every possible check or capture on the board (a) immediately after the opponent moves; (b) immediately before you move. The idea is to look at the position with "beginner's eyes." Am I in check? Can he put me in check? Is anything hanging? Etc.
In other words, account for all the forcing moves.
I play blitz once in a while for fun, but usually for a paradoxical purpose - to get practice in blunder-checking! I don't analyze anything, just look for forcing moves, tempo moves. This usually follows a string of stupid losses in Live Standard (or, back in the day, OTB) due to careless blunders, to being too galldang lazy to check every move this way.
Blunders, by the way, also result from poor "sight of the board." From the kind of chess tunnel vision that makes us focus on only part of the board - the 1/4 in the vicinity of our attacked K, for example. Even the greats are not immune. World Champ Botvinnik was known for his blindness to "long moves" (attacks looming on a long diagonal). He had to work constantly to ensure that his sight of the board included all 64 squares!
there is much i can learn from good players like dave and apawndown and i intend to do that and at the same time i would like to make an effort to represent "tips" not as if it were some kind of a recipe with guaranteed success nor hard and fast "rules" that are not to be broken but simply as a collection of "thought atoms" that we use and their utility is in their aggregation into a a single list for us to peruse as a way of stimulating and guiding our chess playing strategy. thank you apd, for the quick lesson on hypermodern. now i know what it is. i don't really see it much in play and so perhaps we are not all that modern being old farts :-).
Absolutely understood, what you interpret "tips" to mean, J. And you are right. But all too often such 'thought atoms' (I like that term!) get twisted into the kind of recipes or rules Dave and I inveighed against.
Continuing the discussion of FORCING MOVES, the sine qua non for playing forcing moves and blunder-checking is -- Tactics!
The videos here, especially by Rensch, are a painless way to learn and re-learn tactical and mating patterns an techniques. Same for the "Mentor" lessons and of course the "Tactics Trainer." (Again, forget the ridiculous rating system! Disable it, even! I, for one, am pretty slow at some of these puzzles, and so can solve some but still lose rating points.) I really like the video series by Camilla Baithingsgaite on Tempo Moves.
You don't have to be a computer- brain calculating 4-5-6 or more moves ahead to be a decent tactician. John Curdo told me he thought being able to see two-movers well was very good. After a loss to Reshevsky, Botvinnik decried his inability to calculate some simple two-movers. When asked the hackneyed question of non-chessplayers to GMs, "How many moves do you see ahead?" - expecting the mythical answer of 10 or 20, Petrosian (known by his peers as an excellent tactician) replied, "Usually one"!
I need to take my own advice: my blunder-checking is often lazy and my calculating isn't so good anymore. But I can't think of better exercise for a senior brain than solving tactical problems.
Third and final principle/element: BASIC ENDGAMES.
Here is where several of the tips on the list have immediate practical use,
Endgames are like the short game in golf: If you practice the short game, your whole game improves (practicing the long game does not improve short game). Capablanca insisted, and I believe him correct, that working on the endgame would improve one's overall game.
Endgames show, in the simplest, purest form, how pieces interact with the geometry of the board, and so contribute to better board sight.
Endgames show, in the simplest, purest form, how forcing moves work; basic tactics.
Endgames involve a lot of "technique," which is a kind of knowledge and skill learned "out of the book" and requiring a certain amount of practice and repitition (an ability which is a godsend in time pressure! Like the ability to quickly deliver a basic mate.)
[Kids really light up when they learn to do one of those!]
These techniques include the classics of K+P: opposition, distant opposition, square of the pawn, triangulation. (Basic pawn endings are excellent practice in calculation.}
. . . and of Rook endings: rook behind passer, Philidor's Defense, checking distance, etc. which just have to be learned and practiced "the old-fashioned way."
. . .and other ideas, like the principle of two weaknesses, what color to put pawns on, etc.
These ideas are seen simply and clearly in many endgames, and so a list of rules-of-thumb makes sense.
-----------
Board knowledge; forcing moves ( esp. blunder-checking); basic endings = the foundation for decent chess.
Wish I learned that at 14, or 30!
it is to be understood that each tip is followed by the phrase "ceteris paribus"
Oct 23, 2013
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#14
I have a book. "The Tao of Chess". It has 200 essential examples such as these. I think, to be a good player, you have to learn how to switch from lesson to lesson, seamlessly, from move to move.
Also to see where the rules don't apply
Do you recommend that book i seem it at Barnes and Noble ?
Nov 24, 2013
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#17
It is a nice, little book, Kev. It presents the same principles that Jama listed at the start of this post. They are just general ideas, however, and there are times where breaking or not following the guidelines are essential depending on the position. I.e, you can definitely drop your queen if you can force mate in three moves. It's a fun read though, as it shows how chess principles can apply to real life situations. :-)
About a year ago, chess.com had posted a huge pdf file of chess tips. Although the tips themselves were very good, the organization of the material made it hard to use. In case you missed it or, like me, you just gave up, here are the key points in a summary form. Your comments and suggestions for further improvement of this list would be greatly appreciated. Here it is:
1) Rapidly deploy knights and bishops giving priority to the knights
2) Pawn to center during the opening
3) Castle early and deploy the queen to connect the rooks
4) Keep your pieces centralized
5) Avoid moving the same piece twice during the opening
6) A lot of pawn moves during the opening is not a good idea
7) Don't deliver check if it does not lead to anything
8) Don't open a position until your pieces are fully deployed
9) The pawns should be ahead of the queen during the opening
10) Trading a deployed piece for one that is not deployed is a loss
11) Trading pieces is beneficial to you if you are ahead in pieces
12) Trading pieces is a disadvantage if you are behind in pieces
13) Kingside castling is better than queenside castling
14) Queenside castling requires a king move to a safe square
15) Prevent the opponent from castling by making him move his king
16) Prevent the opponent from castling by controlling squares in the castle pathway
17) Control as many squares as possible. Territorial domination is good.
18) Advance pawns but advance with caution.
19) As pawns advance they get harder to defend.
20) Trade pawns when your pawn gets closer to the center in the trade
21) Control the center before you launch an attack
22) Pay attention to pawn structure. Pawn structure is fundamental to strategy.
23) Avoid doubled pawns, isolated pawns, and backward pawns
24) Try to force your opponent to create doubled pawns, isolated pawns, and backward pawns
25) Avoid creating holes. (squares that can no longer be defended by a pawn)
26) Minimize the number of pawn islands (pawn clusters separated by files with no pawn)
27) Advance hanging pawns with caution. Don't create holes.
28) Identify the opponent's backward pawns and harass them.
29) Force your opponent to advance hanging pawns
30) Try to create passed pawns (pawns that cannot be defended by pawns)
31) ALWAYS blockade your opponent's passed pawns (knights are best. or bishops)
32) A pawn majority far from the enemy king is good J
33) On the side with a pawn minority carry out a minority attack to create an isolated pawn
34) Trades are good when your opponent has tempo
35) ….. when you have a material advantage
36) …. it will weaken your opponent's pawn structure
37) ….your piece is passive and his is active
38) ….eliminate an important defender
39) ….simplify a complicated position
40) The value of a piece varies according to its position
41) Use rooks to control open files
42) Try to place your rook on the 7th or 8th rank (from white's perspective)
43) Two of your rooks on the 7th rank is a strong position
44) Keep knights close to the center
45) Knights on the edge have limited mobility and those in a corner can be trapped
46) A bishop blocked by its own pawns is a bad bishop
47) A bishop that can move more than 1 square in more than one direction is a good bishop
48) If your opponent has only one bishop ….
49) ….. keep your pawns in squares of the same color as the bishop
50) ….keep your king in squares of the other color
51) A good bishop is worth more than a knight
52) A bad bishop is worth less than a knight
53) Knight on the 5th or 6th rank protected by a pawn is an Outpost
54) Outposts are good J
55) Two bishops are worth more than any other 2-piece combination of bishops and knights
56) If your opponent has a pair of bishops block their activity with pawns
57) If you have only one bishop keep your pawns on the other color
58) Place your bishop at the head of your pawn chain
59) If your opponent has two bishops try to trade off one of them
60) Keep your eyes on the squares controlled by your opponents bishop
61) A bishop can dominate a knight
62) When your opponent makes a move ask yourself …..
63) …. what new threats does that move create?
64) ….what new opportunities does that move create?
65) ….why did he make that move?
66) ….what does the move attack or defend?
67) ….where has defense or attack been withdrawn by that move?
68) ….which diagonals, ranks, and files are obstructed by that move?
69) ….which diagonals, ranks, and files are opened by that move?
70) Beware of back rank mate. Keep back rank protected.
71) Beware of overloaded defenders. Don't let that position linger too long.
72) Don't automatically recapture. Think of what intermediate moves you could make.
73) Intermediate moves are those that force your opponent to respond while the recapture opportunity waits.
74) If a piece is attacked you can defend it or counter attack a similar piece.
75) Don't mess with your king safety pawns unless absolutely necessary
76) If your king is in danger of a check, move it
77) If you are cramped, open your position with trades
78) Try to identify your opponent's best piece and trade it off the board.
79) Keep your pieces defended
80) If your enemy has only one bishop keep your pieces on the other color and your pawns on the same color.
81) Guard against pins and break pins as soon as possible.
82) If your opponent attacks on a side, counter attack in the center
83) Trade off your opponents fianchettoed bishop.
84) Identify opponents weakness to launch an attack
85) In an attack your pieces must work together in a coordinated way
86) Open ranks, files, and diagonals
87) Identify key pieces in your opponent's defense and get rid of them
88) Whenever you have material advantage, trade to simplify the board
89) After a failed attack, re-organize your pieces
90) In the endgame, centralize your king!
91) The king must be active in the endgame
92) Flank pawns are good against knights because knights are not strong on the edge
93) Rooks must be active in the endgame
94) Always place a rook behind a passed pawn
95) Centralize the queen in the endgame
96) Don't expect your opponent to make the weak move that you need him to make