4-Player FFA Openings

One of the top strategies for opening an FFA game is to earn an early pawn promotion. Are usually choose to do this with my queen pawn, as it will be defended by the queen during its entire journey to promotion.

The strategy is extremely powerful, as it forces at least one other player on the board to play the “sheriff” if you will, pushing their own pawn to keep me honest and not give me an immediate advantage in the game

Keeping this pawn defended by my queen is a top priority, and I usually only use a move other than a pawn push to prevent my queen from having to move.

For example, if one of my opponents makes a move that causes our queens to be attacking one another I will block that attack by moving another piece, usually my knight which has the added benefit of defending the pawn as it advances.

Similarly of one of my opponents makes a move that puts pressure on the queens bishop I will also block that attack, for one reason I do not want to have my queen capture that Bishop and then have to move her back to the file she started on wasting tempos, but also because I am very strongly against trading Bishops, especially early on in the game.

In a perfect situation my king will be castled short side, I will have knights on F3 and C3, and I will have a rook on the file next to my queen backing up the kings pawn as it moves up the board along with the queens pawn.

This is a slightly slower strategy I will use rather than just running the queens pawn up the file by itself if my other opponents are using a similar strategy and we run into a pawn gridlock in the middle of the board where no immediate queen is available to anyone.

Key takeaways:

1. Strongest opening move is “d4”
2. Block attacks by adjacent players with knights or pawns
3. Don’t trade bishops
4. Don’t trade Queens
5. Don’t let your Queen be pulled off her home square (“D1”)

Never do this. Only high level players will use a queen pawn bait and block with a knight. You should open with rook pawns, do the classic knight and king protection, gang up through an insta kill you can practice in 2 v 2, or do a bishop queen push. If you do pawn push with queen it leaved you open to check and the whole game is dead if you don't know how to play.