There are thousands of named openings, and some players spend years memorising them. You don’t need to. Almost every good opening follows the same few principles, and a player who understands them will get a sound position against anyone — even without knowing the name of what is on the board.
The goal of the opening is simple: get your pieces out of their starting squares and into the game, make your king safe, and do it quickly, because every move you spend on something else is a move your opponent spends on development.
The four squares in the middle of the board — d4, e4, d5 and e5 — are the most valuable on it. A piece in the centre reaches more squares than a piece on the edge, and whoever controls the middle can move pieces quickly to either side.
That is why the most popular first moves are 1.e4 and 1.d4: each puts a pawn in the centre and opens a line for a bishop and the queen. You don’t have to occupy the centre with pawns — some openings control it from a distance with pieces — but you can never ignore it.
Development means bringing your pieces off the back row to squares where they do something. In the opening, the pieces that matter most are the knights and bishops. A useful rule of thumb is to bring out the knights before the bishops, because a knight’s best square is usually clear early on, while the best square for a bishop often depends on how the pawns are placed.
Two habits go with this:
In the opening the centre is where the fighting happens, and a king left there is in the line of fire. Castling tucks the king behind a wall of pawns and brings a rook towards the middle in a single move. That is why strong players usually castle early.
Once you have castled and brought out your minor pieces, your two rooks will see each other along the back rank — they are connected. That is a good sign that your development is complete.
This is a quiet line of the Italian Game, one of the oldest openings in chess. Neither side has done anything spectacular — and that is the point. Both have followed the principles, and a modern engine rates the position as close to level.
The queen is your strongest piece, which makes her tempting to use straight away. The trouble is that she is also your most valuable piece, so every time your opponent attacks her with something cheaper — a pawn, a knight, a bishop — you have to spend a move running away, while your opponent develops.
In this example White threatens a quick mate on f7, and a beginner may fall for it. But Black parries it with a pawn move that hits the queen, then blocks her with a knight. After four moves, White’s queen has moved twice and only one other white piece has come out; Black has two knights in play. The early queen raid has cost White time, not won anything.
The most extreme example in chess history is the Immortal Game, where Black’s queen made eight moves in a twenty-move game — and Black lost while still having every single piece on the board.
An early pawn offered by your opponent is often a trap for your time rather than your material. Taking it is not always wrong, but ask what it costs: if you have to spend two or three moves taking a pawn and bringing the capturing piece back, your opponent gets those moves for free.
In the Opera Game, Paul Morphy could have taken a pawn on move eight and chose instead to bring out another piece. Nine moves later he was giving checkmate.
These are principles, not laws. Good players break them all the time — but for a concrete reason, having calculated what they get in return. Early in your chess life, breaking them without a reason is the fastest way to lose, and following them is the fastest way to reach a playable middlegame.
It works the other way too: when your opponent breaks a principle, look for a way to punish it. In the Game of the Century, Donald Byrne moved the same bishop twice while his king was still uncastled — a small breach of rule 2 — and a thirteen-year-old Bobby Fischer made him pay for it.
Once these become habits, you are ready to learn real openings — and our opening trainer, in Learn, will help you build a repertoire of your own, line by line.
Chess pieces: “cburnett” set by Colin M. L. Burnett, CC BY-SA 3.0.
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