Learn Chess your way with a TakeLessons expert

As a game, chess is traditionally divided into three phases: the opening, the middlegame, and the endgame. While all three are important, today I’m going to help you start out strong in the opening. When I first learned how to play chess, I played openings that really did not help me improve and left me with an awkward start to the game more often than not. Eventually, I adopted some of the openings that I will show you in this post and my rating skyrocketed. Opening Principles The first

The end of the game has come. You have successfully out-maneuvered and outfought your opponent, conquering large swaths of the chessboard, and approaching that triumphal moment when you will topple the opponent’s king and declare that he has fallen---in other words, a checkmate (recall that “checkmate” is an anglicization of “shah mat”, Persian for “the king is dead”)… Only to realize that you don’t quite know how to finish the game, which inevitably results in a slapsti

I will admit to you, the reader, that most of the articles I have written thus far assume that the reader is already a fairly avid chess player, who is aware of the basic chess rules and thus is interested in learning more advanced strategies, traps, and tricks with the goal of decisively defeating the opponent. But, of course, not everybody is born knowing all the rules of chess---there are, in fact, many out there who are unfamiliar with the game, and need an introduction to learn chess