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Good habits for beginners

Once you know how the pieces move, these habits will save you a lot of games.

You don’t need to memorise these habits. Notice them a few times while you play chess against the computer and they become automatic.

Three opening principles

For roughly the first ten moves, doing these three things is enough:

1. Fight for the centre: use your pawns to occupy or control the central squares d4, e4, d5 and e5. Pieces in the centre have more places to go.
2. Bring out your knights and bishops: get them off the back rank instead of moving only pawns. Try not to move the same piece twice in the opening.
3. Castle early: tuck your king into a corner and connect your two rooks. How to castle is in Special moves.

The queen is the most powerful piece, but if she comes out too early, she often gets chased around by smaller pieces and you lose time.

Before every move, ask three questions

1. What does my opponent's last move want? What does it attack? Is a check coming?
2. After my move, will any of my pieces be left unprotected and simply lost?
3. Do I have a check, a capture or a threat of my own?

Most beginners don't lose because they lack deep strategy. They lose because a piece slips away by accident. This habit alone will win you a lot of games.

Watch out for the Scholar's Mate

This is the most common quick trap: White's queen and bishop attack f7 together. At the start, f7 is protected only by Black's king, which makes it Black's weakest square. For White, the matching square is f2.

How to defend: as soon as you see your opponent's queen and bishop both aiming at f7, block the line or guard the square first, for example with a knight.

The two most common tactics

The fork

One piece attacks two targets at once. Your opponent can save only one of them, and the other is lost. Knights are the best at forking, because their attacks are hard to see coming.

The pin

A piece can't move, because if it did, a more important piece behind it would come under attack.

Basic middlegame ideas

Once the opening is done and you can spot the tactics, it helps to have a little "plan". No theory to memorize — these ideas go a long way.

Pawn structure: doubled, isolated and passed pawns

Pawns can't move backwards, so where they stand shapes the whole game.

• Doubled pawns: two of your pawns on the same file. The front one blocks the back one, and they can't protect each other well.
• Isolated pawn: no pawns of your own on the files next to it, so no pawn can defend it; only pieces can.
• Passed pawn: no enemy pawns in front of it or on the files next to it, so nothing can stop it on its way to promotion. Very valuable in the endgame.

Put your rooks on open files

A file with no pawns on it is an "open file". A rook there can drive straight into your opponent's camp — often the best square is your opponent's 7th rank, where it eats pawns from the side and hems in the king.

Good and bad bishops

A bishop only moves on one colour. If most of your pawns stand on squares of the same colour as your bishop, they block its path — a "bad bishop". If your pawns are on the other colour, the bishop is free — a "good bishop".

So when you place your pawns, think: put them on the colour your bishop doesn't use.

Trade when you're ahead, avoid trades when you're behind

When you're a piece up, every trade makes your advantage clearer: with fewer pieces left, your opponent has less to fight back with. When you're behind, keep the pieces on — they're your chances to set up a tactic.

Learn from your losses

After a loss, don't rush into a new game. Press "Undo" to go back to the move where things went wrong and think about what else you could have played. Or step through the game in "Moves" to find where your position started to slip. Against the computer, you can take back as many moves as you like.

Keep these in mind, then play chess online again and see whether you lose fewer games.