Transcript
Welcome to this chess course. First off, I want to congratulate you on getting the course. I think it's a
Great idea, chess is pretty much the richest game out there.
And it really has this
this appeal that's so hard to understand
I mean, Howard Stern, Bill Gates, Martin Shkreli, Clay Thompson, Priest Holmes, the Klitschko brothers,
Medical doctors, lawyers, I see them all playing chess.
and
You know, one of the things that I've heard personally from medical doctors
is that they want to create those masterpieces.
It's just the ultimate mind game, even if you have
you know, a really
taxing
high service job
there's just something really special about chess, something really beautiful about chess, and something really intellectual about chess.
it's just
such a challenging game so just want to congratulate you on actually getting this course.
And I think really only a few hours of knowledge is necessary to be able to beat
probably 99% of the people that you'll ever play
so it's nice to be able to beat people you know like people at work, your friends, anybody
in a game of chess.
It's something that comes up surprisingly often. You go out to a bar, there's a chess set there.
you go to a little party, someone whips out a chess set
see it happen all the time. So,
Very good choice on getting this course. I'm International Master Erik Kislik.
And I myself got into chess
because I played in a tournament when I was 13 and I was just hypnotized by the game
I just realized, "Wow, this game is really, really deep."
And I just love the strategy behind it.
And when I really got into the strategy of chess, I started to think, wow, this has so many parallels to life.
So many things like slowly building up your position, having no weaknesses,
and just kind of building yourself up throughout life is a lot like what people do in a chess game. They kind of build up small advantages.
They bring their pieces into the game.
And then they finally launch an attack, usually, not always of course, but
This is a common way that a game develops even at pro level, or especially at pro level I should say.
So,
First of all, I want to say that the goal of chess is checkmating the king.
So sometimes you can checkmate the king very early on in the game and that's why it's very good
to be aware of all of the straightforward simple checkmates.
All of the basic checkmates I think should be known and can be learned very quickly.
So my recommendation is to watch all of the basic checkmates.
Watched them two, three, four times.
Make sure you know those.
and I think you can get them down pretty quickly.
So just to sum up,
One of the ideas, one of the basic ideas
is that we're trying to checkmate the opponent's king.
and
There are a couple cases where we can checkmate the king where it will be trapped.
So essentially on the back, so in chess there are ranks and there are files.
and
So files go from A to H and ranks go from 1 to 8.
And when the king has all of its pawns, I'll show you some examples of this later, but basically
when a king cannot move anywhere,
and is checked on the back rank with nothing to block with
then it's a back rank checkmate.
And when you see a bunch of examples of this type of checkmate,
it starts to become very simple to see
And I notice that there are other checkmates on the side of the board
that a lot of people just
wouldn't consider, but it's the same idea
and the basic name of it is called the Corridormate.
So it's kind of like you trapped somebody in a corridor
and then they're done.
So
You know, a lot of these things in chess are related to king safety because the goal of the game is checkmate.
And if you're not able to checkmate the king,
What do you want to do after that? Well, instead, I should say, to try to increase your chances of checkmating the king,
two main goals
One is to try to win material that your opponent has.
And if you win enough material, you'll just totally outnumber their army and be able to take lots of their pieces.
Additionally,
being able to clean a pawn, promote one of your pawns,
is very very important. I'll be talking about the pieces shortly after this.
And another thing that's very important to realize in chess is that
Weakness is the basis for all tactics.
So without anything actually weak in the opponent's position
it's very hard to land a deathly blow
Whereas, you know, for instance with something like fighting, it's very different because the human chin is quite weak. And if you take a hard shot,
pretty much anybody can be done. So, you know, in chess it's a little bit different. Inherently, positions are very solid
If one side makes no mistakes,
puts all their pieces on pretty good squares, puts their king away into a safe place,
So all of these things are very important to
to think about and
One thing that I want to say is that
It's always been so amazing to me how
the combative nature of chess
really brings out so many interesting personalities and really excites so many players
And it's just the depth of the game, the amount of ideas and conceptions
It's really such a warlike game.
Because of how warlike the game is, you know, you're kind of like at the head of the chain of command.
I think it's actually very interesting to think about chess strategy
in terms of war strategy. So I want to start off and discuss some
typical...
kind of war strategies and then we'll see how they apply to chess
so that you can kind of conceptualize some of the strategies and what you might try to do
because there's a pretty heavy overlap and it's actually very interesting when you factor all of that in.
so you know ultimately arm
Usually during wartime the main three goals
of
either side
in general. The first one is to conquer and destroy the enemy.
In chess, that's not necessarily to capture all their pieces.
it's to checkmate their king,
and
Of course...
Capturing the main body of the enemy army is often very useful, of course.
Taking possession of their material is very important as well.
and occupying the opponent's capital, well, for instance, in a war,
But in chess, what that would mean is taking control of the center.
or taking control of the opponent's
seventh rank very close to their king.
And so essentially,
What a lot of people do who are starting out in chess is they'll put a lot of their pieces on the side of the board and they won't focus so much on the center.
But the problem there is
it's a little bit like let's say you're trapped in a closet. It's kind of like that. Where let's say you're in an apartment and somebody breaks into your apartment
and
You know, if you get trapped in the closet, you can't escape.
Let's say you're in the main living room and you have two or three doors out.
you might have three different options to get out.
and that's the mobility factor.
So it sounds like a strange analogy, you know, a home invasion.
but that's actually a pretty good one in chess.
so if you're only playing on the side of the board and just kind of touching everything on the side and
not paying attention to the center
If they're playing in the center, they're going to be controlling a lot more squares.
So that's a very important one as well.
So in chess, you know, if you can win the opponent's material, win it. If you can occupy the center or put your rooks on the seventh rank,
All of those things, yes, of course we want to do those things. And if we can, if we can conquer and destroy the enemy, of course we want to do that.
Another thing that I want to talk about are more general strategies.
more general war principles and strategies. And one of them is using your entire force with the utmost energy.
In other words, don't waste time.
And in chess this is very important as well. One thing you may notice
is that when a lot of people start playing, one of the first things they do is start moving the queen around.
I have my queen here
Oops.
They start moving the queen around and they might move it one, two, three, four, five times in a row, but the problem is
if you're only playing with one piece
it's not going to be very effective.
and you won't be playing with the utmost energy.
And to really get the most energy out of your pieces, you have to have as many forces as possible participating.
So that's a very important thing to think about.
Another strategy is concentrating on the main point.
And that's a very common thing if, let's say, if you're playing for Checkmate.
you're thinking about, "All right, well, where could I possibly checkmate them? What is weak?"
And you look for a way to take advantage of that.
Another one is
basically optimal utilization of force.
and in other words, concentration of force.
this is exactly what I was talking about where if you play with your queen too much and don't focus on using some of your other pieces
you know, if you don't bring your other pieces into the game,
there can easily be a problem because the thing is you won't have enough concentration of force
Imagine your opponent has four pieces in play.
and you only have one in play,
those four pieces will easily be able to cover an attacked square
whereas the one piece attacking
probably won't be able to do much damage. It'll basically be a one-man mission when you could have a five or six-man mission. So
it's important to make sure that you have all of those pieces in play
whenever possible and I'm going to show plenty of examples of this.
And another important thing is economy of effort.
So, you know, that basically means the resources, tools, weapons you have available
and you're going to want to be as economical as possible.
So let's say you want to defend your king.
what you might want to do is if you can use one or two pieces
to defend almost all the key squares next to your king
That is a great use of economy of force.
because you're using minimal force, the minimal amount of pieces,
to defend a lot of space.
Likewise, if you can attack the same way, if you can attack, let's say, with three pieces,
that's a very valuable thing to do as well. So another strategy I want to mention is flexibility.
And flexibility, I mean, the analogy that I talked about with the home invasion, that's actually a pretty good one when it comes to flexibility.
So if we're totally controlling the center, we can easily move from side to side. I can easily go over here or over here.
I can easily go down here or back here.
So if they're only controlling a small amount of space, they can't really move very well. So that's a really important thing to think about.
Flexibility is really important because
not only does it give you the possibility to overstretch the defensive side
but also allows you to just generally change course.
So whether you're attacking or defending, you can easily kind of juke your way out of things, go from side to side, you can go wherever you need to go.
So flexibility is an important thing.
and
Also, of course, like I was tying this into, cooperation is very important. Cooperation between your pieces. And I can totally remember when I was just starting out in chess, and I would always try these attacks with one piece, two pieces in play.
and I would have these pieces just sitting in the corner, not participating at all. And it's basically like, imagine that you're the CEO of a company. You're running this company,
and let's say you're running a restaurant or something
and you have a couple of your workers
who just like to hang out in the fridge and just kind of hang out, you know, play on their cell phones. They're not doing any work.
And you're like, hey guys, get back to work.
That's exactly the problem if you have inactive pieces that are not doing anything.
So I'll show you some examples
of pieces that are out of play, not doing anything, and the importance of bringing them into play.
so
If there's not a lot of action going on, if there are no direct threats, there's nothing kind of exploding, nothing that exciting going on,
a very useful strategy
is just to improve your worst place peace.
If you have a piece that's badly placed,
We want to bring it in and we want to develop our forces. We want everything to come into the game. So we want everything to come into the game
as quickly as possible and as energetically as possible, because, like I said before, we don't want to waste time.
So another thing is that security is very, very important. And what I mean by that is I mean security
for your king.
And that is exactly why early in the game, usually, not always, but usually,
One side will put their king in the corner
And the whole point is that you put your king in the corner of the board
And if the king is in the corner, then it's going to be much harder to attack
and much easier to protect
because from the corner it can't be attacked as easily on both sides.
It can only be attacked on one side.
That's a very important point.
But I do want to mention that sometimes the king is safe in the center
There are two main cases where the king would be safe in the center.
The first one where it's safe in the center
is when the center is completely closed. There are no open files. When there are no open files
then that's a typical case where you can just keep everything closed,
No problem, your king cannot be attacked.
Another one is when enough pieces have been traded off
that your king is no longer a target.
And I do want to mention that the king can be a very useful piece
in any kind of endgame, it can actually be quite an active attacking piece.
So in some cases we can use the king as an attacker
And in other cases, the king can itself run away from an attack. So if we can run away from a dangerous battlefield and run to a safer quadrant or section,
then that can very often be a good strategy itself.
So it is important to realize that the king has flexibility itself
but we do need to be careful because
If the king has no actual pawn cover,
we can easily be in some danger. So we have to be careful about exposing our king too much.
We can advance pawns in front of our king as long as it's not exposed or as long as they can't take advantage of that.
So that's a very important thing to keep in mind.
Another thing that you should keep in mind is
to just be aware that there's an opponent on the other side.
they have their own plans and their own ideas and their own threats
And theory of mind is a very important principle
It basically means that you're putting yourself into their shoes
and considering what are their desires, what are their wants.
What are they trying to do?
And when you're aware, even loosely aware, even if you have a slight awareness of what they're trying to do,
where they're trying to attack you, what they think is weak.
then you're already in a better position. You have more information
than you did before so you can make a more informed decision.
So theory of mind is very important in chess. And the last thing, the last general principle I want to talk about before we get into more specifics
about how the pieces move,
some checkmates, some queen traps, things like that, is perseverance.
And I have a saying, which I made it myself, and I think it's quite useful. I say, "Don't despair.
Look for compensation.
And what I mean by that is you'll play games.
where suddenly you lose a pawn.
suddenly you lose a piece.
The important thing then
is to not panic.
Don't freak out about it.
start to think about well what are the positive sides of my position what kind of compensation can i get
Can I attack something? Is there king weak?
Can I expose their king somehow? So there are cases where you might be down two pawns or three pawns
And you might be able to even play a sacrifice
that doesn't look correct. You know, maybe it's very risky.
But if it exposes their king and gives you some real chances into the game,
then you might pull yourself back into the game. So always look out for those chances. Always look out for that compensation. There are a lot of cases where...
you think to yourself,
Oh no, it looks like I'm losing a piece.
but you pause.
You look around the board, you think, wait, can I attack their king?
No, okay. Can I attack their queen? Can I attack something...
valuable? Can I attack the rook?
And sometimes when you're just looking around the board,
for something valuable to target and attack
You might go, "Okay, well, my guy's in danger, but I can attack something even more valuable or of equal value."
and a lot of the time that's going to save you in games
this ability to consider ideas
where you're attacked
But it's not a game-ending kind of attack. Let's say they're attacking a piece.
and
they expect you to move it or defend it.
but instead you counterattack.
So that's very important to look for those possibilities
especially when you're really
not sure, and you're really kind of basically afraid. You're thinking, "Oh no, I'm just losing now."
So the last thing with
kind of a loose connection to perseverance,
is never have self-doubt when you're attacking.
and
The reason for that is, well, I mean, I've had games myself.
where I've played players who are
in the top, let's say, 30 in the world.
And I just couldn't believe that I was out playing them. I couldn't believe I was about to checkmate them. I couldn't believe I was about to win the game.
and
It's a really unhealthy thing to think. You basically, if you have a strong attack going, you have to just be objective.
You have to be honest with yourself. You have to go, "Okay,
I have worked really hard for this advantage. I have outplayed this
you know, very good player.
And now I need to push this home. I need to press hard. I need to look for the best moves.
and I need to basically not be intimidated. Okay, I'm playing a great player. I'm playing
you know
They're good. They're good.
stubborn, they're putting up a lot of resistance but you know what I'm gonna keep fighting. I'm gonna put them under pressure and
And I'm going to play with the utmost energy and try to crush them.
So that's very, very important to keep in mind.
So onto the pieces
I don't know if everyone will know how to move the pieces,
But that's something to learn very, very quickly, and which can be learned very quickly, of course.
But I'll go from the least valuable to the most valuable.
So the first one is the pawn.
And what I'll say about this is that
On the first move, on the very first move, you can move your pawn two spaces ahead.
And so only when your pawn is on its initial square
can you move it two spaces ahead?
and otherwise you can only move it one square ahead.
but captures and squares that it's controlling
are diagonal to the pawn.
And that can be a little bit confusing when you first encounter it. So I'm going to show some checkmates after this.
which will show the pawn supporting a queen for some checkmates.
so the pawn is the least valuable unit and let's
and it has a value of 1.
basically by everybody's metric.
So the pawn is the least valuable thing in chess, but they're very important for protecting your king.
And they're also important sometimes for attacking. They're important for controlling the center. They're important for many things.
So we shouldn't use them loosely very often in games.
we want to plant upon in the center of the board
to secure space and we call that a stronghold.
So oftentimes very early in the game we plant a pawn and it's basically like
we're planting a stake for our army and we're saying you know what we're controlling this part we're controlling
this part of the center and we're not going to let you cross the middle of the board.
We're not going to let you in. We're going to be stubborn.
We're going to control everything and we're not going to make it easy for you.
So the pawn might be the least valuable but it's very important to handle it well.
So we're gonna see examples of this later on but
Hopefully the movements will become clear.
the
Minor pieces, there's a knight
And I assume most people know how a knight moves. A knight moves in an L shape.
Basically it moves one square over and two up
in any direction of course. So basically what that means is that when a knight moves, anytime it moves, it's a hop.
It's a hopping motion.
And so essentially what that means in terms of a knight
is that in closed positions, or if the play is in a small quadrant of a board,
A knight is quite effective because it has those unusual movements
in that part of the board.
So knights are very important in terms of-- knights, for one thing, are actually quite good at defending the king, because imagine you have your king in one part of the board.
you have your knight nearby and it's controlling a whole bunch of squares
with its weird L-shaped control.
So it can often have that kind of spiderweb type of defensive ability.
So the night is very important in that regard, in just controlling everything.
And also when you're attacking the opponent's king likewise,
A knight in close proximity to the opponent's king can be a very good attacker as well.
So when a knight has a very good outpost or a very strong stable square
Both in attack and in defense, it's very valuable.
Of course, a lot of the time a night
doesn't quite find a great square for itself.
so that can be an issue in itself because it's a shorter range piece and it's
mostly maneuvering and working in small quarters in close quarters
But
The knight is very important in that regard, so we'll be looking at some examples of checkmates involving the knight
just kind of emphasizing the power of the night
in close proximity to the opponent's king.
So the next piece is the bishop.
and basically how the bishop moves
is diagonally
and essentially what that means and this is something that a lot of people don't pick up on
What that means is because it moves diagonally as many squares as it wants in
you know whichever direction it can go in
Sometimes a bishop can actually be an effective piece
on its initial square.
because a bishop can be on its starting square and it might actually be kind of shooting through space and controlling some important squares
and sometimes you can kind of pull it back and have it kind of block your king.
So the bishop, you know, two bishops together, when two bishops are
assisting each other in attacking, they're very effective because they control different color diagonals.
So it's like you have these two laser beams shooting
and controlling a whole bunch of open space.
and if you have the two bishops
If you have two bishops and your opponent only has a bishop and knight, if they don't have two bishops,
then your unopposed bishop
is going to be a very important piece.
because they don't have the same bishop.
So we'll talk about some checkmates with the bishops, how to get those pieces more active, what you want to do with it later on.
and the rook
Rooks usually very early on in the game
are unable to do that much because they're in the corner.
They start off in the quarter and they only move
they move in straight lines
So, you know, as far as they want in...
in a straight line horizontally or vertically so
Rooks are very important.
usually as more and more pieces get traded off because
then they usually have more open lines.
But...
You know, the rook is the second most valuable piece and
two rooks compared to a queen. Two rooks are slightly more valuable than a queen.
and
One of the things is that when two rooks are playing against the queen, they can sometimes try to overpower it.
basically have two pieces attacking one square or one pawn
whereas the queen is trying to defend. I do want to say though, just if you want to think about it in number terms,
Basically, a rook is worth a little bit...so I said that a pawn is worth one.
The bishop and the knight are both worth about three and a half
and the rook is worth a little bit more than five.
and the queen is worth 10.
And these numbers were arrived at through very deep computer research and analysis. So they're very accurate to like the 99.999 percentile.
But it's very useful actually because if you think about imbalances, like, "Oh, my opponent has this piece and I have this other piece."
you can compare and imbalance.
So let's say for example you have a rook
for your opponent's night,
you know your rook being slightly more than five
is worth a lot more than their three and a half.
And part of that is because the rook's mobility is so much greater than not only the bishop, but also the knight.
So it's important to have very clear ideas on material
and make sure that you're not giving up material
and
So the last two pieces are the Queen
and the king. I know they look kind of similar but they're a little bit different here. But basically the queen can move in any direction as many squares as it wants.
And it's really, really important to have a good handling on the queen.
because
You want to be careful about having the Queen
really just moving around in the center very early on in the game because
The queen, when it's attacked by a much weaker piece like a knight,
it's gonna have to move right away.
So you want to be careful about putting your queen in a position where it's vulnerable to peace attacks.
by other pieces.
So the Queen is really important in that regard and sometimes finding a great square for the Queen
can be really, really valuable in long-term chess strategy. If you have a really dominant queen and the opponent has a bad queen,
you'll often have a big advantage on the basis of having better pieces.
So I'm going to show a bunch of interesting examples.
where a queen gets trapped
and if you can trap the opponent's queen and
you'll probably be surprised by how many cases will come up simply because they're unexpected, simply because
your opponents probably will have no idea what you're doing. They'll go, "What? My queen is trapped? I can't even move it?"
So that's something which I'm going to show a bunch of examples of and you'll probably be really surprised by them but
If you trap your opponent's queen, let's say with a knight,
you'll have so much more material than your opponent, you'll be able to overpower them with your army. Usually with very direct play, very direct and energetic play, using all your pieces together.
So lastly, the king
King, very important to focus on King's safety.
having your king safe, being very aware of
how safe yours is compared to how safe is your opponent's.
because if your king has no pawn cover, it's out in the open, they're just running after your king, you can be in big trouble.
So,
Always try to make sure
that I'm very aware of exactly how safe my king is.
So King Safety is a huge, huge deal.
The king can move one square in every direction.
so
It's like the queen, but the queen can move infinitely in any direction, whereas the king can only move one square.
But I do want to say that if the king is totally safe,
and you're really late in the game. Lots of pieces have been traded off.
the king can be a very good act of peace because sometimes your king will just march straight up the board.
and maybe might support, let's say, a passed pawn. You might be trying to
you know, well, one of the things which is very important about pawns
is if you push your pawn all the way to the edge of the board, to the end of your opponent's
eighth rank to the end of the board.
you can get a new queen.
And so basically you're trading your value of 1 for 10.
So that's a big deal. If you can promote a pawn, that is a really huge deal.
So,
You're going to also want to pay attention to that. And one piece of advice I have
One piece of advice I have
If you're totally winning,
You have way more pieces than the opponent.
a really simple strategy you can play that a lot of people don't think about
is just try to march your pawns up the board as fast as possible.
you know you might just have upon it to just go who just run straight up the board
If you can run your pawn straight up the board and you have tons of material,
You get a new queen.
Let's say you get a second queen, you have two queens, it's very easy to checkmate the opponent's king with two queens.
because they control so many squares.
So it's really important that you handle your pieces like that.
you know make sure that if you're up a lot of material
that you focus or at least
Don't neglect the possibility of
really just trying to
trying to queen pawns, and late in endgames,
There are entire endgames. There are...
just entire libraries of positions where the only way to even get winning chances, even get a chance to win the game, is to try to promote a pawn
and get a queen.
So when you push your pawn to the other end of the board, you don't have to get a queen. You can actually pick whatever
piece you want besides a pawn
But since the queen is the most valuable,
I would say, I don't want to say 99%, but about 95% of the time, we do want to pick a queen when we get to the edge of the board.
So,
It's very, very important that you pay attention to these things, because I can show you lots of examples where
You know, late in the game, people are like, oh, I'm up a lot of material.
"Oh, I don't have that much time left," or, "Oh, I couldn't figure out what to do," but
the simplest plan
if you're up a ton of pieces
you don't know what to do is try to queen a pawn.
Try to push your pawn straight down the board and try to queen it.
So hopefully you're able to use some of this advice
I'm going to move on to showing you basically how pieces move in action. So there's a nice feature on chess.com and I'll show you that one in a second.