Thinking and information skills

How to learn chess from scratch

You can learn the rules of chess in an evening, but playing with a plan takes months. An adult beginner does not need to memorise opening lines: early progress comes from tactics — seeing that a piece is hanging and spotting forks. Below is the order of study, how to combine games with puzzles and how to review your own games.

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Week 1: all the rules#

Set up the board so that the corner square on each player's right is light. The moves: the rook goes along ranks and files, the bishop along diagonals, the queen like a rook and a bishop combined, the king one square in any direction, the knight in an L-shape, jumping over pieces. A pawn moves forward but captures diagonally.

Learn the rare rules that trip beginners up straight away: castling (and when it is not allowed), en passant, pawn promotion, and stalemate as a draw. Get comfortable with algebraic notation — without it you cannot read books or review games. A sign that the rules have sunk in: you have played a dozen games without once trying an illegal move.

Weeks 2–3: basic checkmates#

Learn to checkmate a lone king with king and queen, then with king and rook. This is not a formality: here you learn to coordinate pieces and push the king to the edge. Practise against the computer until the rook mate works reliably from any position.

Opening principles instead of lines#

Instead of memorising openings, keep three rules in mind: take the centre with pawns, develop your minor pieces (knights and bishops) quickly, and castle within the first ten to twelve moves. Do not move the same piece twice without a reason and do not bring the queen out too early. These principles carry you through hundreds of games; specific openings are worth learning later, to suit your style.

Tactics are the main source of progress#

Most beginner games are decided not by strategy but by blunders: a piece left undefended, a knight fork overlooked. So the most useful daily exercise is tactical puzzles: forks, pins, discovered attacks, mate in one or two. Solve 15–20 puzzles a day, but do not guess: before you make a move, find your opponent's reply. Puzzles are active recall for patterns — the more of them you have found yourself, the faster you see them in a game.

Before every move in a game, ask yourself: what is threatening my pieces, and what can my opponent do after my move? This habit alone removes most blunders.

How to play and review games#

Play games with a time control of at least 10–15 minutes: in blitz there is no time to think, and the skill does not grow. After each game spend five minutes finding the moment where it went wrong, and only then look at the computer's evaluation. Losses teach more than wins: write down in a notebook which motif you missed, and in a couple of weeks you will see which mistakes keep repeating.

The endgame and beyond#

After the first months add the basics of the endgame: the opposition of kings, the rule of the square, how to promote a pawn. This knowledge helps in the middlegame too: you start to understand which trades are good for you. A rating on an online site is a handy measure of progress, but look at it once a month, not after every game.

How much to play and what to avoid#

A benchmark for the first months is half an hour of puzzles and one or two slow games a day; that is enough to beat, within six months, people who play "from what they remember from school". Do not start by buying thick opening books or watching long grandmaster streams: without a tactical base their ideas do not stick. And do not play game after game after a loss — a "win it back" streak almost always ends in several more defeats and teaches nothing.

Step-by-step plan

  1. Week 1 — rules and notationHow every piece moves, castling, en passant, promotion, stalemate; writing down moves.
  2. Weeks 2–3 — basic checkmatesMate with queen and with rook against a lone king, against the computer from different positions.
  3. Months 1–3 — tactics and play15–20 puzzles a day, games of 10 minutes or more, a review of every game and a mistakes notebook.
  4. Months 3–4 — the endgameOpposition, the rule of the square, promoting a pawn; opening principles instead of lines.

Start learning this in your own space

The plan goes into your repository: tick off stages, keep notes — the change history shows how far you have come.

Start the plan

Check yourself

1.How does the knight move?

2.Which piece does the king castle with?

3.A player has no legal moves, but their king is not in check. How does the game end?

Sources

  • Lichess — LearnFree interactive lessons on the rules and basic techniques
    free
  • LichessFree ad-free site: games, tactical puzzles, computer analysis
    free

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