Opening, Middle-game, or Endgame, Which is most critical for improving your chess and why?

I would say middlegame as it is that when you may blunder pieces do not get tunnel vision as you may lose also I would get a solid opening and work around it but I still struggle from elo anxiety it is driving me crazy as I feel pressured to rise to the top

hello my friends

Several people in this thread have emphasized that one should work on all phases of the game. I agree. Where you and I disagree is where to begin. You claim the opening. I say one should start with the end. The first pages of Jeremy Silman, Silman’s Complete Endgame Course offer elementary checkmates with heavy pieces. This is the correct approach. José Capablanca, Chess Fundamentals begins the same way.

After you master checkmate with a queen, you should make sure that you can get a queen when you enter a pawn ending. Along the way, tactics should be a focus and some general opening principles.

I play a lot of 1500s who navigate the opening well and play the middle game well enough to be equal or often even better. More often than not they falter in the ending. This morning I had a draw and a win against two 1500s who entered the ending completely in control.

Even Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess focuses on mating primarily .

Probably endgame

It isn't important: just a difference of opinion. I'm aware that I'm not the greatest endgame player except sometimes. On form I can work out a complex ending very fast and accurately and I've been told I can play like a GM. Unfortunately, that rarely happens and most of the time I'm hit and miss. That's because for me, endings aren't something to learn but more like something to work out over the board.

I don't see the point of learning endings until you can reach them. Learning openings teaches piece development and leads into middle games, so they're an aid to learning middle game basic tactical themes. This is just my point of view and I see it the other way round from you. First learn to promote a pawn to a queen and once you can do that, then, well, mating with king and queen against solitary king doesn't need to be learned. I could mate with knight and bishop against king within two years of taking up chess. Shortly after that, N+N+K vs K+p. Back then I used to reach such endings but nowadays I don't. I think my style became more aggressive two or three decades ago..

As Smyslov wrote, studying endings teaches you the characteristics of each piece, their power and potential. Their limits as well.

I’ve spent weeks standing at the edge of a board watching a young player chase a king all over the board with a queen or rook, check, check, check, … but never checkmate. For some people, this skill comes naturally. Most have to learn it.

IMO

a : Against bots I would say first the endgames then the opening then the middlegames.

On [for example] the Chessmaster program from 1100 to 1700 (apart from the fact that it is a program which normaly is not designed with an opening encyclopedia) we'll play vs bots with "a chess essential" (thanks to the lessons of notably Joshua Waitzkin) the bots present themselves as fake-weak players who play badly by giving us more or less very advantageous or winning positions then start playing well.

So what matters is rather to be good enough in tactics and to have good enough knowledge of the art of playing endgames to realize our decisive advantage.

+1800, the openings have an important role because some openings are just bad or ineffective against bots but also because if we play garbage or disadvantageous positions after the opening it will too often end in more or less painful defeats.

b : Against humans I would say first the middlegames then the openings then the endgames.

Humans play much more strategically with ideas and plans so it is important to have a background of strategic knowledge, to understand good enough positions and anticipate the attack plans of our opponents.

You can say he wrote it but was it important? It would become important if it was a high priority and something you can't learn in the course of an ordinary game. Maybe we could even say he was wrong, since endings are positions that are too simplified to really learn the powers of the pieces from. Just because some famous GM writes something he thinks is right but which isn't connected with actual chess play (this is connected with learning chess, not playing at a high level) doesn't mean some other GM isn't going to disagree with it. Einstein wrote that God doesn't play dice with the universe and he argued against quantum theory for many years and slowed the progress of physics almost single-handedly. He was wrong, of course.

People don't really look at mating nets as often as they need to. But that just hides the underlying issue. Here's the trick I teach people about chess when I am trying to teach them how to play effectively:

When controlling the board, or mating, your pieces don't really exist (there are exceptions to this viewpoint, like one of your pieces blocking the way of another piece). Defensively, your pieces exist. Offensively, the one square that a piece is never able to exert influence on is the square it sits on. So, a queen is nothing, offensively, where she sits. All the power of the queen is in the rank, file, and diagonal squares the queen can reach. So stop looking at your queen, and start looking at the lines of influence. If you learn to see pieces as exerting influence around them, then seeing mating nets, control of open files, outposts for knights, etc. all become a lot more obvious.

^^ Yes, exactly. It should seem obvious but perhaps it isn't always and therefore it's worth emphasising that lines of influence are a piece's potential position and pieces should be seen in terms of those.

When I'm playing slow chess, I work out mating nets exactly. When I'm playing 5 mins blitz, though, there isn't always time. If there's three minutes left then yes, you can spend a minute or two to carefully work it out. But if there's only 20 seconds left it probably should be more intuitive. Like making soup. Yes we want some light square control but the majority should be dark square control and we can gradually close in. A knight would be useful and that pawn outpost defended because it will be useful. Is my king safe for three moves or so? If so I can probably ignore pieces not directly concerned with my check-mating plans and let them be taken. That makes it easier to focus on the crux of the matter.

Endgame

@DiogenesDue

Influence. Something akin to a lightbulb clicked on in my mind with your analogy. I appreciate your comment, i hope to practice this immediately. (At my level i need all the help i can understand.)

Probably middle game tactics is where most players lose most often, but the endgame is vital, too. The opening is vastly less important. All the evidence deployed in this thread in favor of the opening is really about tactics.

The more you say everyone should start with endgames, the more I'm going to say "openings" because there's no one right way to teach chess. A rigid approach is probably the worst way to teach anything, though.

If you can't approach chess by learning to develop your pieces so they can all engage in the game, you aren't going to get anywhere. Emphasising openings is not about emphasising tactics. It's about emphasising proper development of the pieces. In my opinion, starting with heavy piece mates is patronising and slow. It comes from a time when many people were regimented into thinking alike, where possible, in situations where thinking differently is much more healthy.

Try looking at it this way: ask yourself who(m) are you teaching? Do you want to attract the bright students or put them off? If your business is to teach people who'll never be any good then sure, endgames first or whatever way pleases you most.

I try to do a mixture, with my son (he's 8 years old).

I give him 5 puzzles a day to solve, setting them up on a physical board. Puzzles like this one:

These are taken from Laszlo Polgar's "Chess" puzzle book. We talk about each one afterward, just to make sure he understands the puzzle and wasn't simply guessing.

After that we set up the board to the starting position and play a game or two. We talk about "getting our pieces out so they can join the battle" (development), and putting rooks on open files "because they're like tanks who want to control the roads". I purposely hang pieces here and there, to see if he spots them and captures. Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn't.

He still struggles with a lot of things, like seeing hanging pieces and missing recaptures ... and positional strategy is beyond his scope at this point. But he seems to enjoy it and we don't push too much beyond that. Just little bits and pieces, here and there.

I agree that there probably isn't a "wrong" way to teach chess, as long as the player enjoys the process and wants to keep playing and learning.

If I had to choose one then for me it would probably be 'the middlegame'.

I started my son with chess when he was about 8 in 1995. I was quite pushy because I believed school in the UK wouldn't stretch him and get him to develop his mind. I used to take him to children's chess classes about 20 miles away and also enter him in children's chess tournaments. He won some of those and was becoming quite promising. He beat a couple of the first team players at our club when he was about 13 and then he asked me very politely if it was alright if he gave up chess completely because he wanted to take up bmx riding with his friends, so I gave it about two seconds' thought and said "of course you can".

I thought chess had probably done its job. He hadn't seemed amazingly promising at school but I knew he was obviously clever and had a lot of potential. He did go on to get a first class masters in maths and a PhD in physics. Now he's working in engineering and has an extremely good job. I had looked on chess as a necessary part of his education and it seemed to work for him.