Chess Blog Day #29 - Introduction to Chess Openings
Chess openings are the moves that you make to start a game of chess.
Chess openings are arguably the least important part of chess. Often players can make completely random moves for the first few moves and as long as their position isn't lost they'll be fine.
However, sometimes games are decided in the opening, especially in tricky openings or with opening traps. We saw before how for beginners Scholar's Mate can be hard to defend against.
Playing a good opening is also a great way to maximize your chances, and you have nothing to lose by learning some.
As players improve openings become more important, especially in slower games.
The reason I mentioned them being relatively less important is because many players spend too much time studying openings without winning many more games.
With that out of the way, let's talk about some opening principles.
The main thing you want to achieve in an opening is to control the centre of the board. This is why 1.e4 and 1.d4 are the two most common first moves.
The next thing you want to achieve is minor piece development. Most of the time you should move knights out before bishops. This is because knights only really have two good squares to go to, and most of the time they only really have one. Bishops, on the other hand, have many squares they can move to and so you should wait and see what your opponent does before committing them.
The next thing you want to do is castle. If you're in a position where you would prefer to castle long you will of course also need to move your queen first.
The final stage of the opening is connecting your rooks. This happens once you have castled and the queen, bishops and knights have all moved. The rooks defending each other is very often useful.
Now let's talk about how openings are named. If an opening name ends with the following:
Attack: (eg. Horwitz Attack) This is an aggressive opening for white.
Defence: (eg. King's Indian Defence) This is an opening for black. This is just convention because white goes first. Many "defences" are still quite aggressive. It's useful though because you can immediately tell which side an opening is for just by its name.
Counterattack: (eg. Traxler Counterattack) These are black openings that are definitely aggressive. Usually in response to an attack by white.
Opening: (eg. Spanish Opening) This is an opening by white that isn't quite so agressive.
Game: (eg. Italian Game, not to be confused with the Italian Job) Used to refer to openings for by either side. For some white openings it's used interchangeably with "opening" (Spanish Opening/Spanish Game, call it what you like).
Gambit: (eg. King's Gambit) This is used as a name for openings where one side sacrifices something (almost always a pawn, but sometimes a knight or even more rarely a bishop). This is mostly white openings but not always.
Countergambit: (eg. Falkbeer Countergambit) This is when one player plays a gambit but the other side not only declines the gambit but plays one of their own. It's the Uno reverse card of chess openings. This is mostly black openings but not always.
Now that we've covered the basics of openings, it's time to look at some.
Tomorrow: The Spanish opening.