You Should Start Playing Chess, The Original Cult Classic Board Game
Ah, chess. The sport of kings. The game which every other game with some strategic element is compared to. Automobile racing is chess on wheels. Ball sports are chess, with a ball. Suspect policy decisions are chess (played in the 11th dimension, with human emotions). While some are loathe to admit that chess has yet to recapture the cultural relevance it had during the Cold War1, chess, the game, is still here. You can play it just as people have played it for the past 1500 years or so.
It's understandable as to why you might second-guess the notion of "just start playing chess." The game, unfortunately as of late, has a bit of an image problem. The 1972 World Chess Championship match between American Bobby Fischer and Soviet Boris Spassky might have been the height of the game's popularity, but the geopolitical context tinged the game with a bit of a for-smart-people-only, Mensa-esque vibe. That the game has grandmasters and a ranking system only reinforces this notion. Chess: The game for smart people to flex their smart brains against other smart brains.
"There's a saying about chess: Chess is a sea that a mosquito can bathe in and an elephant can drown," says Tyler Schwartz, founder and CEO of Chess At 3. In other words, no matter what your skill level is, chess will always present your mind with a challenge. This sounds intimidating! But look at it this way: Chess never gets any harder or easier, you just become better at it.
To hear International Grandmaster Maurice Ashley talk about the game, however, will melt away any negative preconceptions about the game's checkered past. "When people are sitting down, playing chess, they feel the dynamic energy of the game," says Ashley. "That, somehow, they can do stuff — they can do amazing things that can, maybe, destroy their opponent and you just get lost in the world. It really is like a fairy tale whenever you play."
Doesn't that sound nice? Who, after hearing that, wouldn't want to be hunched over a chessboard, deep in thought, wholly consumed by the game, and for a brief time, transported away from some of the more unpleasant realities of life?
Get The Stuff And Learn How To Play The Chess
Since chess is, well, chess, you don't need much in the way of material objects to start playing. Heck, you could draw out an 8×8 board, and the two sets of 16 pieces and you'd have everything you'd need to play right there.
We're going to assume that you did not grow up under a rock, and are somewhat familiar with the basic rules of chess. We're also going to assume that the reason why you're not currently way into chess right now isn't because you're not sure which chess set to buy, or flummoxed by the rules of the game. For the truly uninitiated, start with the US Chess Federation's somewhat in-depth guide to the basic movements and rules of the of the game, and this dead-simple plastic chess set with a roll-up vinyl board.
The reason why you probably aren't playing chess right this second, Ashley explains, is that at some point in learning how to play, you played a friend or relative and they just creamed you so badly that you pretty much swore off chess as a bad game that you're bad at.
What you should avoid, when you start to play chess, is playing people who are much better than you. In most cases, this is not learning how to play chess better. It's learning how much it sucks to get crushed by someone who is miles ahead of you in their understanding of the game.
"Usually what people do is they play against friends, and the friends win and they go 'Ah I can't do this.' And they're done," says Ashley. "If they just tried, or be a little more patient, they'd learn some ideas and have some fun doing it."
So if you do decide to pick up chess, find someone who is willing to be patient with you, who will help you learn through your mistakes, and most importantly, won't use you as a punching bag or self-esteem boost. Maybe that's a friend. Maybe that's a chess tutor if you really want to dive in. Or maybe it's just browsing the vast trove of chess tutorial videos on YouTube.
Barring access to a helpful friend, Ashley suggests turning to, of all places, the internet for an appropriately challenging game. Bad-faith chess players aside, the algorithms on popular sites like Chess.com will match you with someone at your skill level. "You can go online, any day of the week, anytime of day or night and you can find a game with someone, somewhere on the planet," he says. "It's incredible to have this diverse landscape of the chess fandom at your fingertips, every single time you go online."
Next, Get Good At The Chess
To the beginner, chess seems like a series of arbitrary decisions. You make a move. Your opponent makes a move. Rinse and repeat until checkmate. Getting better at chess feels like you need to know every single eventuality in order to make the Correct Move — that you must ascend to a new plane of understanding, a Tralfamadorian of chess. This is now how you should think about chess. In fact, it's impossible to think this way.
"In the first four moves of chess, there are over three billion possibilities," says Ashley. You won't know all of them. I don't care who you are."
Instead, it's better to think about chess as a play in three acts. There is a beginning, middle, and end. If you haved played competitive video games before, you're probably familiar with the terms early-game, mid-game and end-game. Chess, the 1500-year-old strategy game, invented these concepts and they still apply today.
"When you learn chess, it's all about learning a whole bunch of patterns that you will see happen time and time again in the game," says Ashley.
The early portion of the game is all about getting your pieces into position. It might sound obvious, but when you start a game of chess, the pawns are kinda in your way. You need to move them out of the way so the much more mobile pieces in the back can get at the other side. It's obviously more complicated than that, but the general gist is that you want to move your pieces so when you do attack you can do it on your own terms and not be vulnerable.
"In the opening phase your main objective is to bring out your forces efficiently," says Ashley. "You try to control the middle of the board, and while controlling that middle you want to bring your pieces out so that they are harmonized with your pawns."
After decades, centuries and millennia of play the chess world has come up with dozens of pre-determined openers. The opening phase of the game is, more or less, just laying out one of these openers while your opponent does the same.
The mid-game is where it starts to get exciting. Here is when you're starting to attack, and according to Ashley, "attacking" in chess means more than just taking your opponent's pieces. "It may be that you are attacking a king, because it's become exposed somehow. Or maybe you're attacking a weak pawn, because, somehow, your opponent didn't play that correctly," he says. "You might even be attacking a square, you might be just trying to conquer that square, because it's going to be a fulcrum from which you can then jump off and then do other things."
The middle-game, Ashley explains, is where you can, and should, get creative. This might sound scary if the prospect of relying on a predetermined set of moves seems comforting to you. But, as they say, the first step to becoming good at something is to be bad at something. "That art of calculation, as a skill, is something you have to have. Without it, you can't see what's coming," Ashley says. It's tricky to give specific pointers since every game is different, but Ashley has some general advice as the pieces start to move around.
"That middle-game phase is a constant jockeying for position to get that one superiority that will be enough to then create another superiority and then a threat to attack that turns into a threat on the other side of the board going for a pawn," he says. " All these things are being taken into account by your opponent, so you have to be ultra-aware of what your opponent is doing as well."
Chances are, if you're new you'll goof it up somewhere in the mid-game. You'll fall into a trap, you'll miss a crucial opportunity to attack. "Because the game is so rich with complications, it's possible that you'll see a good move maybe one move from now, but 10 moves from now? That'll be a trap that you just didn't see," says Ashley. "It's easy to make a mistake in chess."
Mistakes happen, and those will manifest in the end-game, when the pieces start to fall, literally, into place. There will, inevitably, be few pieces on the board, so the moves you should be making are going to be pretty clear. "So that phase is where things get specific. The board is more simplified, so there's less opportunity for creativity and more rigor and specificity in execution," says Ashley.
Getting better at chess and winning more games of chess aren't always linked. Your goal should be recognizing your mistakes and getting better from them. Eventually that will lead you to winning… eventually.
That's our big chess-playing tip: You won't win all the time, but you will win occasionally and it will feel amazing.
Finally, Play Chess For The Rest Of Your Life
We're not going to sit here and promise you that if you just learn how to play chess The Right Way, you'll just crush everyone you play and only then will you experience true chess bliss. Like most things in life, the joy of chess is pulling opportunities for personal growth from the smoldering remains of your defeat.
"You learn through failure when you play chess. You're not going to play the perfect game all the time," says Ashley. "That's empowering, to know that you can make a mistake, you can study that mistake afterwards, own up to it, and then just get better from it."
Sure, there is theory to learn and strategies to adopt, but chess is a game that is as deep as you want it to be. You can dabble, or you can drown yourself in it. That said, there are no shortcuts and there are no tricks. All you need to do is to just start playing.
"It's really voluminous, the amount of information you need to learn in chess," says Ashley. "You simply just need to step on a path, and go."
