Unlock Your Chess Potential: Tips for Becoming a Better Player

Chess is a timeless game that has captured the minds of players for centuries. In this comprehensive article, we will explore the fundamentals of chess, including its history, basic rules, and how each chess piece moves. We will also discuss special rules in chess and provide valuable tips on how to improve your chess skills.

Whether you are a beginner or a seasoned player, this article will help you enhance your strategic thinking and increase your chances of winning in this classic game. Let’s dive in and discover how to get better in chess!

What is Chess?

According to the United States Chess Federation (USCF), William Stewart, and Siobhán Campbell’s definitions, chess is a two-player strategy game played on an 8 x 8 square board with alternating light and dark squares arranged so that each player’s lower-right corner is a dark square. The 64 squares often are roughly divided into a 16-square section by interposing a line often marked for educational purposes. Each player begins with 16 identically shaped pieces in two different colors, the composition of which includes one king, one queen, two rooks, two knights, two bishops, and eight pawns.

Chess is played on an 8×8 board with two alternating colors of squares. Each player has 16 pieces consisting of a king, queen, two rooks, two knights, two bishops, and eight pawns. The object of chess is to checkmate the opponent’s king. Chess is not solved. Many moves are possible even on the first turn (and have been analyzed in depth). Due to the vast number of possibilities and the combination of strategy, psychology, and tactics needed to perfect the game at the top level, chess has evolved quite a bit since its rules were essentially finalized in the 19th century. There is even the book (in both print and an online Wiki form) called the CPL (Comprehensive Chess Piece Lexicon) that goes through chess piece naming and shape conventions topic-by-topic.

History of Chess

Chess developed from the game chaturanga in India around the 7th century. It was called shatranj in the Persian Empire, heir to much of the ancient Indian Empire’s culture including chaturanga. Chess was played by the nobility of the Medieval Islamic Caliphate of the Umayyads that stretched from modern-day Afghanistan to Western Morocco deforming the game rules as it moved westward. Then it was brought to Europe by Viking, Norman, and Arab traders and invaders during the medieval era.

Chess quickly became enormously popular in medieval Europe with its strategy tradition in war. After developing into its modern form in Southern Europe in the 15th century, it spread to the rest of the world. The rules of chess have not changed much over the past few hundred years. One major change did occur in the mid-19th century. The queen gained the ability to move as knights previously did, in addition to her royal straight-line diagonals.

Basic Rules of Chess

The basic rules of chess consist of the 8-by-8 grid, two players with 1 queen, 2 bishops, 8 pawns, 2 knights, 2 rooks, and 1 king each. The primary purpose of the game is to checkmate the other player by moving pieces in accordance with their unique movements across the board. Only horizontal or vertical movement for rooks, only diagonal for bishops. Knights can move two steps in one direction and one perpendicular step in any direction while capturing. And so forth.

How to Set Up the Chess Board?

To set up the chess board, unfold, align, and smooth a standard 8×8 chess board horizontally so the white square is on the right for each player. Next, place pieces as follows:

1. Use Rooks for the corners with maroons in the a1 and h1 squares and whites in the a8 and h8 squares.
2. Place Knights for the nearest corner pieces with maroons in the b1 and g1 squares and whites in the b8 and g8 squares.
3. Place Bishops for the next squares outside of Knights with maroons in the c1 and f1 squares and whites in the c8 and f8 squares.
4. Put Queens for the remaining center squares with White Queen on d1 (white) and d8 (black) and the Maroon Queen on d1 (white) and d8 (black).
5. Use Kings for the last square with Maroon King on e1 and White King e8.
6. A row of 8 pawns is then set along the second row as shown beside the Crown squares.

Be sure that once the chess board is set up that the White Queen is on the white square (d1 for White, d8 for Black) and the Brown Queen is on the brown square (d1 for Brown, d8 for White). Scrambling the positioning will result in a bad setup that will have a negative impact on which side is able to dominate during gameplay.

How Each Chess Piece Moves?

Each of the six types of chess pieces in combination affects how a chess piece moves. Each piece is allowed to move to a specific set of squares. Along with the ways they individually move, other pieces on the board may restrict the movements of a particular piece.

These tendencies plus the lockdown at the start of a game lead to dynamic start-of-game positions more than eight moves away, according to the Curators of Keith Devlin’s MoMath: Museum of Mathematics. The most dominant pieces in a player’s starting position (king, knight, and bishop) have limited ranges of movement.

The eight original pieces on the board – rooks, knights, bishops, queen, and king – are the only pieces that can control 112 (8x8x2x2 = 512 but disregarding repetitive positions from the other piece) of the unique 400 (64×5, disregarding repetitions) squares on a chessboard. The restrictions provided by the friendly and opposing pieces determine the possible movements of a chess piece. As a result, the possible ways a piece may move can and often do change quickly during the game.

Special Rules in Chess

These are some of the special rules in chess that may give you a competitive advantage according to USCF guidelines. The twenty move rule, drawing with insufficient material, the fifty move rule, the threefold repetition rule (if the same position appears three times during the match by a player), touch move rule (if a piece can be captured without a player having to move an opponent’s piece), and castling (moving the king and one of the rooks at the same time).

Improving Your Chess Skills

The path to getting better at chess starts by improving your chess skills. Some of the chess skills to improve on are knowledge of opening theories, board visualization tactics,
and strategic ideas related to midgame and endgame strategies.

Another vital part of chess skill is focusing on practice. Practice is critical for developing automatic memory and improving familiarity with common tactical and strategic patterns on the board. You can study online chess or practice with a friend, but regular and rigorous practice is essential to achieving proficiency.

Practice Regularly

Chess, like any other skill, requires regular practice to maintain proficiency and improve. Although how much to practice is keenly personal, the US Chess Federation stresses your first goal is to get to the point where you can participate in tournaments. If you never participate in tournaments, they recommend you don’t skip practice games once a week and a few training sessions with your coach. They further recommend practicing two hours a day for kids aiming to be grandmasters by the age of 13, and 3 hours a day for those aiming to be grandmasters by 9. Chessmaster Bobby Fischer was famous for practicing chess for 8-12 hours a day. Whatever the appropriate amount of time for you, please practice.

Chess training programs and chess tutorials provide a structured way of improving your game. Online chess platforms such as Chess.com, Le Chess, and Lichess have copious training resources and tailored chess courses for all levels. There are many success stories from the online world. WFM Alexandra Botez and GM Hikaru Nakamura improved their game dramatically by playing on ICC.

Learn from Chess Masters

Learning from chess masters is key to developing in the sport. Modern society has made this easier than ever, with mega websites like Chess.com and Lichess, available as a platform for most up-and-coming as well as established grandmasters to play regular streams of games and personally comment on every move, for free.

For those looking for a more historical angle, there are tens of thousands of games available involving all the greats, and brilliant analysis pieces scattered throughout the internet. These will allow more casual viewers to enjoy entertaining play or puzzles assembled by the greats, and their dramatic narrative as they unfold as the finger icons nimbly point the way to reveal deadly step-by-step checkmates.

Study Chess Games

Studying past chess games by chess masters is very important for the development of your own game. You will learn from their mistakes and grow by understanding their strategic and tactical maneuvers. The best chess players spend a significant amount of time studying the great chess players of the past.

There are thousands of databases and books of famous chess matches around, so it’s easy to get a hold of past games to review them. After every game, especially one where you could not get the desired outcome, there is always something useful that you can learn by observing what others did.

Try to stick to the chess masters who form the repertoire of your own chess openings. Identify the openings that they more frequently fell into and the strategies that they followed.

Analyze Your Own Games

4. Analyze your own games

frequently to get better at chess. After playing games with others or during self-play, review the moves to understand why the game went the way it did – what are opponents doing that you are not, other opprtunities you missed, etc. Brian Mottershead, who spent months researching Magnus Carlsen, suggests that players treat their own games as data gathering exercises to identify which mistakes they are making most frequently. This helps concentrate their studying efforts on their most critical errors. Self-analysis is incredibly accessible with chess in the modern age and can be done online with tools like chess.com or a physical board with your smartphone displaying moves in real time.

Play Against Stronger Opponents

Once you can confidently win two-thirds of games you play against people who have the same or even lower rating than you (currently +400 points above and below you), it is time for you to venture out against stronger opponents. Use sights like Lichess to track similar rated opponents and choose a few players slightly higher ranked than you to try against. A winning percentage slightly above 1/3rd and much lower than 1/2 is healthy – not for your current games but for your improvement in the future. It signifies you are improving without yielding immediate wins.

Use Chess Puzzles and Exercises

Chess puzzles and exercises are a great way for players to get better in chess because they promote tactical thinking and help identify weaknesses in a player’s blind spots. Chess puzzles challenge players with having to spot immediate threats in return for quick rewards using new solutions for positions players are not used to.

Chess exercises, on the other hand, are like chess puzzles with an infinite number of solutions. These may involve designing an opening sequence, building a strategy, or navigating an endgame. Both chess puzzles and chess exercises are available in books, blog posts, online articles, or chess apps. One of the easiest chess games with puzzles and exercises is the Chess24 app. They also offer instructional lessons and tactics analysis along with puzzles.

Join a Chess Club or Community

Joining a chess club that meets in person is one of the best ways to meet new people who share your passion. At chess clubs, it is possible to find strong opponents and friends to play with on a regular basis. Post-chess game analysis is one of the easiest ways to improve and is a service that most other serious club members will offer. Chess clubs build a sense of community that provides motivation for individuals to make daily contributions to the game.

Tips for Winning in Chess

The following are 15 tips to help with winning in chess. Some tips I offer were based on the results of a study completed by Jens Holder et al. of the Department of Sports Science at the University of Tübingen in Germany to analyze the physiological arousal responses to a chess game. They observed factors contributing to whether a winning or losing player was more physically or mentally aroused. The main finding of this study was that physiological arousal is the biggest factor in determining the outcome of an individual game, that it evolves organically and can change frequently throughout the game. It would be advantageous to understand and manipulate one’s own level of arousal, as Larson noted that poorer novice players are usually calmer, which makes it easier for them to observe their own and their opponents’ moves. Additional findings regarding predictors of a win and loss include the following.

1. Do not lose your major pieces.
2. Develop quickly and properly.
3. Control the center of the board with your pawns.
4. Look for free material.
5. Do not hastily take free material from the opponent.
6. Complete your opening development before the endgame.
7. Keep your king safe.
8. Connect your rooks.
9. Only move a piece to a particular spot if it has the purpose to go there.
10. Always have potential threats in mind.
11. Defend your pawns diligently.
12. Have the next move planned.
13. Stay calm, physically and mentally.
14. Have optimal arousal.

Control the Center of the Board

Chess features a rectangular 8×8 board divided into a 64-square playing area that can be deployed symmetrically in an L or U pattern. By controlling the center, you form a foothold deeper inside enemy territory and have greater scope to attack or defend on the side of the board, depending on the strategic situation.

The four squares e4, e5, d4, d5 are central to the playing board’s deployment, location, and control, and training yourself to gain advantage in these specific spots determines the middle game’s effectiveness as a whole. This is known as the 50% rule. One must capture 50% of the 64 squares to achieve victory. If one can handle at least 30 squares, then it is possible to achieve a draw.

Develop Your Pieces Efficiently

To develop your chess game strategy and improve your pieces are important goals at the first stage of a chess game. Development aims to bring all your chess pieces together as a team, ready to work together to cover important central squares, challenge your opponent’s pieces, and extend your control over the board. Players vary in their strategic approach to piece development, particularly their knights. Some wrap their pawns around the knight to block them until they can be released, while others bring their central pawns through the opening phase of the game to the protogenous phase of development. High-level chess players understand that developed pieces allow for increased space, reduce the risks of early attacks, and open new channels for attack.

The following are some points you should pay attention to for achieving efficient piece development in chess.

• Don’t move the same piece multiple times in the opening. Chess champions advise that you should try to make one move per piece in the opening, not multiple moves. This limits flexibility in the game and makes it so that your opponent can target possible weak points which appear after moving multiple pieces.
• Don’t develop the same chess piece into an open center, but try to avoid doubling pawns. Chess players should seek to move their center pawns with a purpose, focusing on not letting their bishops get blocked and controlling the center.
• Develop bishops before knights. Bishops have fewer moves than knights in the beginning. So, try to open the board before developing knights.

Protect Your King

Protect Your King is the third concept of playing chess by grandmaster Lubomir Ftacnik to help improve your game. The basic goal of protecting your king is to ensure your opponent does not get a chance to put your king in checkmate.

There is a simple way to achieve this. When not occupied with movement of big pieces, via expansion and center control, at least keep your chess board occupied with protective pawns in front of the king. Yes, keep at least 3 to 4 pawns in front of the king, so that you don’t leave any unnecessary weak spots for the opponent to plan and make their next attack.

Lubomir provides a simple and effective method to build an iron wall in front of the king involving placing all your pieces in the back rank.

To initially learn to protect your king, Lubomir strategically places every piece in the back rank of his half of the board, leaving the pawn to defend the king’s row. As the match continues, he aggresively begins using his pieces, but keeps the two rooks aligned to defend their king by attacking their opponent’s pieces. He makes effective early use of the bishops, while maintaining control with knights where they are in a constant spot to return from.

Create Threats and Attacks

You can rapidly improve your chess game by rebutting the natural tendency to avoid risks due to fear of losing. You have to think about where to move pieces on the board to put the opponent in check. The more options of threatening the opponent’s pieces and king pieces you create, the better you get in chess.

This thinking of where to move pieces to create threats on the board, which includes Pins and Forks as previously discussed, is part of a broader concept known as Creating Threats and Attacks. This refers to any move that causes the opponent to react. The word “attack” does not specifically refer to an “attack on the opponent’s king.” You can “attack” pieces by creating threats on the board at every turn. This video by the Saint Louis Chess Club, “Two Seesaws of Chess,” offers examples of creating threats and attacks in chess.

Think Ahead and Plan Your Moves

Thinking ahead, especially at higher levels of play, is critical in chess. As we mentioned in our Playing Against People at a Higher Level segment, grandmasters often think up to ten moves ahead. They try to anticipate the opponent’s reply to each move so that they are better prepared for the game.

Thinking ahead to the future involves looking at the importance of each target on the board, looking at future piece issues, and trying to assess how the game proceeds if there is a major change. Even though it is just a quick game of chess, thinking ahead is still crucial, but it is not merely planning. Whether you are playing a rapid format or bullet format where you can afford only a few minutes or even seconds per move, you still need to try and get an idea of what your ultimate strategy will be.

Keep Your Opponent Off-Balance

Keeping your opponent off-balance is the cornerstone of good chess strategy. Off-balance opponents are unpredictable and liable to make mistakes, giving you opportunities to exploit them.

The best ways to keep your opponent off-balance are to place them in time pressure, control the center of the board, and to challenge your opponent’s pieces by creating threats. According to Professor Fabiano Caruana, the world number two chess player in 2021, when you are in an equal position or worse, winning on the clock is often your chance to win the game.

Having time pressure is key because your opponent knows they are a move away from losing, which forces them into a defensive frame of mind. Meanwhile, it gives you time to explore different possibilities from your side before making death move.

To keep your opponent off-balance, set up fortress positions like the triangle that enable multiple possibilities and mental scuttles through strategic and tactical territory for you to explore.

An off-balance opponent seems more confused, erratic or unpredictable and is liable to make mistakes that can lead to your victory. Harsha Rallabandi, an active online chess player who has reached an Elo rating of around 2000, gave this beginner tip in one of his ChessBase India videos. Ask yourself what your opponent’s last move was asking or threatening, and what they are anticipating you will do next. If possible, find something else to do.

Stay Calm and Focused

Calmness in victory and magnanimity in defeat are crucial components in chess. When the tide of the game is against them, beginners have a proclivity to be overly agitated, leading to impulsive tactics and bad strategic decisions. Drawing inspiration from sporting heroes who remain stoic even when the game is against them offers a fresh perspective.

Frequently Asked Questions

How to Get Better in Chess?

What are some basic strategies for improving in chess?
Focus on controlling the center, developing your pieces, and protecting your king.

How to Get Better in Chess?

Are there any specific openings or defenses I should learn to get better in chess?
It’s important to understand the fundamentals of openings and defenses, but ultimately it’s more important to focus on developing your overall strategic thinking and decision-making skills.

How to Get Better in Chess?

How do I balance offense and defense in chess?
It’s important to have a balance of both offense and defense in chess. Pay attention to your opponent’s moves and try to anticipate their attacks while also looking for opportunities to launch your own attacks.

How to Get Better in Chess?

Is it helpful to study famous chess games to improve?
Absolutely! Studying the games of top players can help you understand different strategies and techniques, and improve your overall gameplay.

How to Get Better in Chess?

What role does practice play in becoming a better chess player?
Practice is essential in any skill, and chess is no exception. Consistent practice allows you to hone your skills, develop your intuition, and improve your overall understanding of the game.

How to Get Better in Chess?

How can I improve my endgame skills in chess?
Focus on learning basic endgame principles, such as using your king to help your pawns promote, and practicing endgame puzzles and scenarios. Also, studying famous endgames can help you understand key strategies and techniques.