Chess Tips Series
Five first Steps for Chess Beginners
1.
Play as much as possible – The first thing you want to do is to find a chess club in your school, neighborhood or town and join it. You need a place where you can go at least twice a week and find different opponents to play with. Join a club even if you are not sure about the chess rules - chess players are always happy to teach new comers how the knight moves, how to castle and what is an en passant capture. Yes, you will lose many games during the process but this is the fastest way of learning. Essentially, you will be getting free-of-charge chess lessons from the other club members and they will get a boost for their egos.
2.
Learn the Algebraic Notation - This will enable you to read magazines, chess books and chess websites that will improve your game, mostly by following the games of the great masters. The algebraic notation will also enable you to ask your club members questions, using the chess “language”. For example you will be able to say sentences like “I played the Ruy Lopez as White when my opponent suddenly replied my ‘bishop to b5’ with ‘knight to d4’, would you believe that?” to which your interlocutor can answer “Oh, that’s the Bird, no need to be over worried about it, let me show you…” (You can learn the notation here or in any chess beginners' book)
3.
Learn the basic mating patterns – Strong chess players commit to their memory a huge number of positions in which they just know what to do (don’t be concerned, this does not make the game boring but only richer).
Your own “archive” starts with the basic mating patterns. You can see a load of mating patterns here. Learning a pattern means that you do not have to think about a move when you play, you just see it, as if the pattern becomes part of your eyes. This sounds a bit Zen but this is how it is once you learnt the patterns (and who said Zen is not right?).
4.
Solve chess puzzles – this is where you improve your chess vision – one move ahead, two moves ahead, three moves ahead… and solving chess puzzles is so much fun! You can start by solving puzzles on the web (e.g. the Chessbug puzzle archive) but soon you will need a more thorough and balanced introduction to chess tactics.
If you are inclined to reading books then I recommend Littlewood’s classic Chess Tactics (but avoid Reinfeld’s 1001 Chess Sacrifices and Combinations that contains many puzzles but also mistaken and partial solutions) If you are computer knowledgeable then you have even better options – because you can find software that you can exercise interactively with.
In this section I recommend Chess Tactics for Beginners (on which a full review will be published in Spring 2007).
5.
Start playing with a clock – the clock is an important part of the game and serious chess players call the clock “the 33rd piece.” Chess is not only about what you can think about but also about how fast you can do it.
Either in your chess club or on the internet (a good free web-club is freechess.org) you should start playing with a clock.
I suggest that you start playing with a time control of fifteen or twenty minutes for each player – if you play in longer time controls then you may get bored while shorter time controls (like the classic five-minute game) may prove useless because you still lack many basic patterns so you need some time to think on your opening moves before you put into action all the tactical ability you gathered by now.
Remember to perform these steps in the right order! This means that you should first find a real chess club with real human beings to play with and only when you are a member of such a club, or a group of friends, or schoolmates or whatever, come back to this guide and follow the next steps so you can play with your newly acquired chess mates and turn them into dust!
Written by Moshe Rachmuth.