Strategy

What do you think is the best (quickest and easiest) overall strategy when playing chess? I seem to have problems with the strategies I currently use.

I would suggest a beginners book on chess if you want to know the basics. There is no such thing as an "overall strategy", chess is more complicated then that.  There are strategies, but these are little things like "value rooks more then bishops".  You don't become a strong strategical player after reading one forum post, you become one after much study and play of chess.

Nevertheless - a beginners book (one that explains the moves of chess in the front) ought to teach you some basic strategies, along with basic endgames, tactics, etc.  It's really not that much money, only 10-20 bucks, you should be able to find a beginners book in most bookstores.  Or you could get one from your library.  Better yet get a chess coach who can tell you what strategies you are missing.

If i had to say something as a strategy...  Be greedy, try and hold onto every piece/pawn.  Move your two central pawns 2 spaces forward whenever possible.  Develop your knights and then bishops as quickly as possible.  Castle so your king is safer.  The worth of each piece in pawns is: Pawns = 1, knights/bishops = 3, rooks = 5, queens = 9.

Again though - buy a book.

The simplest answer:  Silman's "How To Reassess Your Chess".

Also, get your pieces on spaces where they can control the maximum amount of squares, such as getting your knights in the center, bishops on the long diagonals (a1-h8 and a8-h1 diagonals), and rooks on the open files.

If it's quick and easy, it's probably not worth much and it's definitely not the best. 

Those things that are best take a while to develop. 

They require hard work, study, discipline and dedication. 

Why would you suggest how to reassess your chess to a 1000 rated player malibu.  Why.

I believe Silman stresses strategy above all else.  Tactics can be picked-up, but understanding what you're doing is important.  I recently bought Daniel Naroditsky's "Mastering Positional Chess".  He is 14 years old.  He relates that he used to study mainly tactics and he kept losing.  He started to study strategy (Petrosian and Karpov) and started winning.

Indeed.

develop and mate seems to be the best overall strategy that works for me.

The "Play Winning Chess" series (the first three titles in particular) Silman co-authored with Yasser Seirawan seem like a more accessible path to the same core concepts that are in Reassess, and with material on tactics as a "bonus" in the second volume.

In truth, Reassess itself isn't too dense either... especially if you skip all the annotated games.  :)  Be interesting to see what's new in the 4th ed. later this year...  Actually, that should be out any time now, shouldn't it?

This is one of the main differences in becoming high class player or experts, versus just being rated in the sub-classes.

Positional play and strategic moves are what everyone tries to learn to improve. Tactics, openings, and endgames are important too but those are game-specific patterns you learn, and they don't always come up.

The real expert knows how to create those situations that lead to finishing the game.

Knowing how and why to maneauver pieces in a closed-middle-game with few pieces off the board is difficult for all to learn. Don't think that many people on this forum even know all about it.

Seems like books are a good way to learn this (hence why I'm still in the sub-classes, because I never bought a chess book in my life yet, but will soon).

My best advice is, study tactics first. Strategy is a much higher-level concept. Trying to understand pins, forks, and the concept of hanging your pieces is what is missing in most below-1200 players.

Fight viciously for the center and if you win start a brutal attack. But not until you win a good share of the center. Of course at a certain point the center is almost worthless so just fighting for the center will win you plenty of games.

I think the 4th edition is already out, at least on amazon. I'm considering buying it, but I don't know if it is absolutely aimed for someone like me who is around 1400.

Like many said already, chess strategy is specific to each position and is very difficult to get right.  Not only is that kind of strategy irrelevant to you right now, none of us are very good at it either so who are we to teach it (although I'd guess (?) the titled players probably have the basics down and are ok at it :)

That said there are some general tips that would be useful to you now and for a few hundred points to come.  Based on how I've seen 1100 players playing, some advice that might pass for general strategy would be:

Look out for tactics.  I should probably list tactics 5 more times on this list :)
Keep your pieces active and protecting each other
Don't capture or trade just because you can
Don't assume your opponent will capture just because they can
It's better to activate another piece or protect an important point than capture/trade for no reason
Unless there's a real threat, don't react to your opponent's last move, instead attack a weak point, defend one of your weak points, or activate a piece that's not on a good square.

Mostly this comes with practice and tactics (piling up on a weakness, being aware of and defending your own) but giving you this impromptu list couldn't hurt.

 I wouldn't say you don't have a strategy, going by the game linked to. It's just not a very effective strategy.
http://www.chess.com/echess/game.html?id=30977700

I'll be honest with you - watching your game is not fun. Just five moves in, you had made a total mess of your position and failed to take into account basic threats. Your king position was compromised, you dropped pieces and you subsequently demonstrated that you don't have a good conception of the relative value of the pieces, their preferred positions, how to develop properly.

So you need to go through some chess basics.

But you want to improve - your question shows that. I would begin by playing through a lot of games of chess, once I'd gone through the basics.
Go through a bunch of games - to begin with, don't try to see deep into the positions. Just punch your way through games of chess, spending some seconds on each ply, before going to the next. Get a sense of the flow of good games, how the pieces go to their best positions, how they interact. See something interesting? Stop, evaluate, go back and forth - move on to the next game.

Make sure the games are IM or GM games. What you want is to get a sense of the board - what happens where, where most pieces best belong, how they are used in various stages of the game.
Here's a trick. First pick decisive games, and go through them from the winning side first, and then the losing side. Then move on to the next game, doing the same.
When you've done a lot of games in this way, you will actually begin getting a flow-pattern imprinted on your brain, you'll start to instinctively feel when something's not right. Trust me.

While doing that, make sure you understand piece relationships, and commit yourself to preserving those. You dropped a rook, a bishop and sac'd a knight, while also allowing yourself to get into unfavorable exchanges. That's because you are not respecting the relative values of the pieces, and taking that into account.

As it's a CC game, my final word of advice. Don't play a lot of games - focus on a few, and play them better. The game listed looks like a game of Bullet gone badly wrong - you can do better.

Hi ostrich 321-

   I stand behind my recommendation of Silman's Reassess your chess.  But here is the absolute best book.  After you read this destroy the e-mail.  Don't let anyone else read this.  Cecil Purdy's "The Search For Chess Perfection II".  This might cost in the $25-40 range.  Please trust me.  It is worth it.  Even Bobby Fischer said the book belongs in every chess library.  We'll be seeing you in the 1700 & up range in a year.

^ This

Swap off a few pawns; you can still lose but at least you get a game rather than just getting suffocated.

Thanks for all the great ideas!

Just a question to consider:

What is usually the first move you make in a chess game?

Usually I move a pawn to free up a bishop.