Basic Strategy

There are four simple things that every chess player should know:
#1 Protect your king

Get your king to the corner of the board where he is usually safer. Don’t put off castling. You should usually castle as quickly as possible. Remember, it doesn’t matter how close you are to checkmating your opponent if your own king is checkmated first!

#2 Don’t give pieces away

Don’t carelessly lose your pieces! Each piece is valuable and you can’t win a game without pieces to checkmate. There is an easy system that most players use to keep track of the relative value of each chess piece:

* A pawn is worth 1
* A knight is worth 3
* A bishop is worth 3
* A rook is worth 5
* A queen is worth 9
* The king is infinitely valuable

At the end of the game these points don’t mean anything – it is simply a system you can use to make decisions while playing, helping you know when to capture, exchange, or make other moves.
#3 Control the center

You should try and control the center of the board with your pieces and pawns. If you control the center, you will have more room to move your pieces and will make it harder for your opponent to find good squares for his pieces. In the example below white makes good moves to control the center while black plays bad moves.

#4 Use all of your pieces

In the example above white got all of his pieces in the game! Your pieces don’t do any good when they are sitting back on the first row. Try and develop all of your pieces so that you have more to use when you attack the king. Using one or two pieces to attack will not work against any decent opponent.


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Special Rule #6

Draws

Occasionally chess games do not end with a winner, but with a draw. There are 5 reasons why a chess game may end in a draw:

1. The position reaches a stalemate where it is one player’s turn to move, but his king is NOT in check and yet he does not have another legal move
2. The players may simply agree to a draw and stop playing
3. There are not enough pieces on the board to force a checkmate (example: a king and a bishop vs. a king)
4. A player declares a draw if the same exact position is repeated three times (though not necessarily three times in a row)
5. Fifty consecutive moves have been played where neither player has moved a pawn or captured a piece.


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Special Rule #5

Check and Checkmate

As stated before, the purpose of the game is to checkmate the opponent’s king. This happens when the king is put into check and cannot get out of check. There are only three ways a king can get out of check: move out of the way (though he cannot castle!), block the check with another piece, or capture the piece threatening the king. If a king cannot escape checkmate then the game is over. Customarily the king is not captured or removed from the board, the game is simply declared over.

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Special Rule #4

Castling

One other special rule is called castling. This move allows you to do two important things all in one move: get your king to safety (hopefully), and get your rook out of the corner and into the game. On a player’s turn he may move his king two squares over to one side and then move the rook from that side’s corner to right next to the king on the opposite side. (See the example below.) In order to castle, however, it must meet the following conditions:

* it must be that king’s very first move
* it must be that rook’s very first move
* there cannot be any pieces between the king and rook to move
* the king may not be in check or pass through check


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Live Ratings

Live ratings - updated April 30, 2010
Rank Name Rating Change Games
01 Carlsen 2813,0 0 0
02 Topalov 2805,7 +0,7 15
03 Anand 2797,7 +10,7 8
04 Kramnik 2790,0 0 0
05 Aronian 2783,2 +1,2 10
06 Mamedyarov 2762,7 +2,7 4
07 Grischuk 2760,3 +4,3 18
08 Wang Yue 2751,7 +2,7 10
09 Eljanov 2751,0 +15 20
10 Shirov 2741,5 +4,5 10

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G6 Another Draw

The sixth game of the World Championship match between Viswanathan Anand and Veselin Topalov ended in a draw today. For the third time a Catalan came on the board, and after an interesting fight between Anand’s knight pair and Topalov’s bishop pair a drawish ending was played out till move 58 where a move repetition again brought a silent end to the game.

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G5 Another Draw

Veselin Topalov and Viswanathan Anand drew the fifth game of their World Championship match in Sofia, Bulgaria. The two repeated the varation of the Slav that appeared in game 3, and again challenger Topalov couldn’t prove a clear advantage with the white pieces.

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