The Opening? I Wouldn't Start From There If I Were You
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If you want to skip to the recommendation on what to study next after learning basic game principles like controlling the centre and how each piece moves (including the moves like castling, the fiancetto, and en passant) just scroll down to 'The Solution'
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About 15 years ago (late '90s) I was a chess enthusiast. It lasted for a couple of years. During that time I gained a lot of playing experience with my Kasparov talking chess board (before the internet!), but after having decided that I really liked the game I wanted to take things further.
So with lots of enthusiasm I went out and joined a chess club, bought a ton of books and even had a few lessons from a chess coach. All to no avail. My efforts yielded little and the returns were next to nil. I remained a complete novice and was obliterated in every game I played in my chess club. I went and asked the club organiser what I should do (he was also a chess coach and tried to show me a couple of things), but I didn't really understand his advice. It was clear he was used to teaching a calibre of player way above that of my own level.
Some of the books I bought were by Jeremy Silman, and even though this was clearly an author and teacher with few peers, he seemed to be describing solutions to bad habits that I hadn't even had a chance to develop yet! I really was nowhere. In no man's land... Eventually my enthusiasm fizzled out and I stopped playing.
Since starting to play chess again this time around, I again wanted to get somewhere and figured I needed to start at the start and learn as many openings as possible.
The good chess books tell us that memorising the openings by themselves is wrong and that we should learn the principles behind the openings. However with each move in an opening, there's a different strategy, a different game that will result from even the smallest of variations. (Think of the difference between the Ruy Lopez, Italian and Scotch openings)
"...it’s a curious thing to study grandmaster level chess. It is played at such a high level. The lines of play are well known, studied and analyzed twenty moves deep. Positions are scrutinized for any possible advantage. And so, as you study a chess game played on this level, you witness a curious thing. On move 37 white wins a pawn…black resigns. What?"Chess is a complicated affair and we all know that you have to learn to walk before you can run. The problem is how do you learn to walk? Each opening is a complex composition of moves, a symphony of strategies, ideas and counter-ideas, really too much to take in in the beginning.
From my experience, even having tried to learn the principles behind the openings, my playing was still poor because there was something else that I needed to learn first.
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| From Batsford Chess Openings: 350 pages of THIS to memorise? Good luck with that! |
Recently, I found a fascinating article from a British newspaper that really got to the crux of defining chess and why it's so hard/fascinating. Dr. Tobias Galla, senior lecturer in physics at Manchester Uni. said:
‘A ten-year-old can probably figure out how not to lose in noughts and crosses, so there’s a strategy that makes sure you don’t lose. Once you’ve found that strategy, the game is uninteresting, you stop playing it. That’s an equilibrium point. Once you’ve reached that point, you don’t play any more. With these [chess] games with lots of different moves, it’s not so easy to guess these best strategies.
Like the noughts and crosses example illustrates, imagine just learning some moves of a noughts and crosses game, without being told the strategy. Not really hard, and it's pretty easy to see the strategy. So although the chess books tell us that we need to learn the principles behind the openings, it's the principles (strategies) themselves that are also too rich and varied for the beginner to start with. This might be harder for more advanced players (and some coaches?) to appreciate.
The Solution
There is a basic chess vocabulary (if you like), which we need to become fluent in as the next step up the ladder after learning how each piece moves. Just like learning a language after you learn the alphabet, you need to learn to spell words before we get into describing thoughts (found in openings, mid-games), we need to build a vocabulary first. This vocabulary on the chess board is about learning the basic rules of engagement: calculating how two or more pieces can work together to attack or defend, learning what pins, skewers, forks, and discovered checks are; how to manipulate your opponent (forced moves), and so on (GM Susan Polgar has a great new video on these topics). The greater our vocabulary, the stronger our play will be (and like much else in chess and language, you never stop learning).
In the beginning, it's about learning the best move order in any given exchange, as well as some basic end game mating patterns like two rooks and a king against a king. Or king and queen against a king.
Learning these is really about learning to see this stuff on the board (it also helps you not to be caught out by them from your opponents!). Without these basic building blocks, your play will lack the glue to hold all the other stuff together.
Seeing these basic concepts and understanding them takes time and work, but during that process you're becoming familiar with the rules of engagement. Just like learning a language, in time it will become more fluent. Don't worry if this seems like a lot of work. The fact that these little exercises aren't rocket science to grasp, means you can work through them and pick them up quite quickly. More importantly, you'll be progressing at a much faster rate as opposed to struggling with a huge first step as you try and jump up several rungs on the ladder by starting out with openings.
You can also do puzzles like Mate In Two or Three moves. Or searching for puzzles about pins, skewers, forks etc. (Just recommended a great free tactics site for just such practice the other day.)
When will you be ready to move onto openings? The only answer I can give is when you're ready. You should start learning openings fairly soon, but don't try too much too soon. Watch a good openings instruction video. As time passes by and you learn more, you'll be more comfortable with the information and won't feel bogged down. But (quite maddeningly I'm sure) just learning openings by their names (Giuocco, 4 Knights etc.) isn't the best way to go about it. More on that in a later post.
The best advice I can give is to work from a book or two, if you're in the initial stages of learning or teaching. Here are two great books which have helped me immensely and are very well thought out (they start out gently, and while Polgar's book is diagrams only, the Learn Chess book explains the concepts well and builds in increasing levels of difficulty). (Reviews coming soon.)
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Learn Chess by Alexander and Beach
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| Chess by |
Just want to say: my purpose in writing this article isn't to generalise and put chess coaches down. My experience may have just been an unlucky one. I'm sure there are many good chess coaches out there and I just happened to stumble on the wrong ones for me.
Maybe it's similar to music, you don't start learning to play the violin from an internationally acclaimed virtuoso. You start with the millions of other teachers out there and work with them until you reach a level where you're ready to learn from the master.
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