- Chess.com Study Plan For Intermediate Players: The Opening! Target Skill Range: Intermediate (Rated 1400-1799) Acquire the knowledge you need to approach the opening with confidence and achieve success! Extend your base knowledge of "tournament openings." Aim for consistency. Learn the concept of transposition.
Use our Game Explorer and Openings Book features to learn the first 7-10 moves of the following list of openings, commonly played by master-level chess players. This should also help guide you if you are still unsure of a consistent approach for your own games (see Task #2 ).
This free online chess course is aimed at the late-beginner to intermediate level chess players. The course will help you understand the fundamentals of chess strategy.
Aim for consistency. After learning and applying the basic principles to the opening you learned in the Study Plan for Beginners in your own games (and extending your knowledge of main line openings by completing Task #1 ), intermediate players should be ready to take some significant steps in the first stage of chess.
Download this helpful summary of the important skills you need to train!
Download this helpful summary of the important skills you need to train!
The power and activity of your pieces, along with the ability to make threats against your opponent, is known as the "initiative" in chess. Often players are fighting for initiative, while at the same time, always striving for a material or "concrete" advantage.
At the same time as you put all this new knowledge to good effect in your games, you must prevent your opponent doing likewise! The concept of preventing your opponent's plans and threats, in a long term sense (so not just their immediate threats), is known as "prophylaxis" or "prophylactic thinking".
This allows for the opportunity of trapping pieces and exploiting the opponent's misplaced pieces. Here you will see many examples of misplaced pieces and how to take immediate advantage.
In almost every game, errors are swiftly punished, and thus this course may be studied as a source of opening traps and lines to be avoided or take advantage of . This course provides an excellent opportunity to study tactical positions, attacks, combinations, and sacrifices.
A "double attack" occurs when two pieces make two attacks at the same time. The difference between a fork and a double attack is that a fork is one piece attacking two things at the same time, while a double attack is two pieces making two attacks at the same time. The trick to seeing this possibility in any chess position is to look for any situation where one piece is "covered" by another piece, where if the piece where to become "uncovered", it would create a threat.
In a clearance sacrifice the sacrificing player aims to vacate the square the sacrificed piece stood on, either to open up for his own pieces, or to put another, more useful piece on the same square. In this course you will learn how to use this tactical idea successfully so that you will be able to use this idea in your own games.
Deflecting or removing the defender is all about getting a defensive piece out of the way. Often you'll have a situation where if you could just get one of your opponent's pieces away from a key square, you could execute a powerful attack.
This course is designed to explore the fork motif in the game of chess. The fork occurs when one of your pieces can attack two or more of the opponent's pieces. It can be executed with any piece other than the King and it is a very powerful strategy which can quickly turn the tables and lead to a decisive position.
The Queen's Gambit Declined is an extremely solid opening for Black and it's no coincidence that it's been played by nearly every World Champion. Learn the plans and tactics for both sides.
Before doing anything, you must evaluate the board, which means noticing all checks, captures, threats, tactics (pins, forks, skewers, remove the guard, etc) from both players. If you can't do that consistently, you just won't be able to improve, no matter how much tactics and strategy you study.
Chess is a highly specialized skill . It's my opinion that the "thought process" needs to be fixed first, it is like the foundation of everything you do when you are playing. I still haven't worked on it enough myself, but I think the goal is to have a good thought process before every move.
Chess Course is primarily intended to serve as a manual for those teaching chess in schools and colleges and for parents teaching chess to their children or, for that matter, to themselves. From California to New York, this course has been employed successfully in numerous scholastic programs. Since 1986 and through two editions (plus several printings), thousands of players have purchased this course for self-study. And if letters from our readers are any guide, then thousands have used this course to enter fully the world of chess or to progress from beginner status to advanced levels.
Experience suggests that children will require about three months to complete the beginners’ course of 12 lessons, while adults will need roughly two months. After completing the first five lessons during the first month of study, the student will be acquainted with the moves of all the pieces and will know what is meant by checkmating the opponent.
Perpetual check is a term which refers to the situation when one player checks the opponent’s King endlessly, without , however, being able to checkmate it. Diagrams 156 and 157 show typical cases of perpetual check. It is most often a Queen that gives perpetual check, but the Bishop, Rook, and Knight are also capable of doing so.
When the King is attacked by an enemy piece, it is said to be “in check.” A basic rule of chess is that whenever a player’s King is put into check, the player must immediately, on the very next move, get his King out of check. In keeping with this, a King is never allowed to move into check either. That is, a King must never be moved onto a square where it will be within the capturing range of an enemy piece. It follows from this that neither King can put the other into check,and hence the two Kings can never stand on adjacent squares. Nor can a King capture a defended enemy piece, since it would thereby be moving into check. If by mistake a King has been left in check or moved into check, then as soon as the mistake is found out, the position before the King was left in check or moved into check must be set up and another move must be made. Checking is not obligatory, nor is it in itself either good or bad. Many beginners try to check whenever possible simply because they like announcing “check!”.
Lesson 12, the final chapter of Volume I, contains 20 different tests of six questions each. These tests cover the contents of Volume I, and we recommend that students be allowed 60 minutes to take a single test. Coaches are, of course, free to administer more than one test to their students. Indeed, if a student fails to answer correctly more than three questions, he should be allowed to try another test. Coaches make the decision when a student is ready to move on to Volume II.
A serious difficulty is how to teach children not to fear defeat. Some children stop playing precisely because of this fear of losing. Teachers must explain to students that each lost game contains within it the promise of future improvement — if the mistakes made (the reasons for losing) are found and understood. Strong chess players always make a point of analyzing closely their lost games because they know that understanding their chess shortcomings will help them play better in the future.
Indeed, if chess was once called the “royal game,” it is today a pastime for everyman — a pursuit that combines relaxation with intellectual exercise. It is one of the few things in life that is fun, free, non-fattening and moral.
This is part 2 of a course about exploiting typical opening errors or inaccuracies, aimed for stronger players than the first one. A variety of openings, themes, both tactical and positional, are presented. You will deepen your understanding of opening strategy and the balance between black and white's ideas, and particularly improve your ability to deal with unusual moves, off-beat lines, moves played out of order, and opening errors.
The Queen's Gambit Declined is an extremely solid opening for Black and it's no coincidence that it's been played by nearly every World Champion. Learn the plans and tactics for both sides.