Chess Tips for Beginners: What Wins Games, Measured
Chess tips for beginners, measured: know what the pieces are worth, check what's attacked, think about the reply, control the center, and castle early.
Sunroom Games · Updated
Chess has a reputation for being hard, and the full game is endlessly deep. But at the kitchen-table level, most games are won and lost on a few simple habits. To find out which ones matter most, we let our computer player play against copies of itself that each ignored one piece of advice, and counted the results.
If you'd like the rules first, see how to play Chess, which covers how each piece moves, castling, en passant and checkmate.
What our test games showed
We played 40 games for each comparison, with the two sides taking turns to play white. Both sides looked two moves ahead and followed every exchange of pieces to the end, like Carol on Medium. Against a player who ignored one habit, the player who kept it scored (counting a draw as half a win):
| Habit | Score out of 100 |
|---|---|
| Knowing what each piece is worth | 100 (won all 40 games) |
| Checking what's attacked, all the way through an exchange | 96 |
| Thinking about the other player's reply | 89 |
| Controlling the center and bringing out your pieces | 78 |
| Keeping the king safe in the corner | 55 (about the same as two equal players) |
Between two equal players, about 1 game in 4 ended in a draw, most of them by the same position coming up three times.
1. Know what the pieces are worth
This mattered more than anything else: a player who treated every piece as equal lost every single game. The usual values are:
- Pawn: 1
- Knight: 3
- Bishop: 3
- Rook: 5
- Queen: 9
The king has no value in a trade, because losing it loses the game. Use the numbers when you swap pieces: giving up a knight (3) to take a rook (5) is a good trade, and giving up your queen (9) for a bishop (3) almost never is. The count at the top of our game, "You're 2 ahead", uses these same values.
2. Before every move, check what's attacked
Before you move, look at every piece of yours that's under attack, and every piece of Carol's that you could take. Then follow any exchange to the end: if you take, can Carol take back? And then can you? A player who stopped looking after the first capture scored only 4 out of 100 against one who followed it through.
The same check protects you: before each move, ask what Carol is attacking. A piece left where it can be taken for free, often called "hanging", is the most common way games are lost.
3. Think about the reply
After you've chosen a move, ask one more question: what will Carol do next? A player who looked two moves ahead, their own and the reply, scored 89 out of 100 against one who looked only at the move in front of them. Many lost pieces come from a move that's fine on its own but leaves something else unguarded.
4. Control the center and bring out your pieces
Pawns and pieces in the middle of the board have the most room to move and get in the other player's way. In the opening, push a center pawn (to e4 or d4), then bring your knights and bishops off the back row toward the center before moving the same piece twice. Knights in particular are weak on the edge of the board, where they can reach only a few squares. This habit was worth 78 out of 100 in our tests.
5. Castle early, but don't expect miracles
Castling tucks your king behind a wall of pawns and brings a rook toward the middle. It's good advice, but in our tests, keeping the king safe in the corner made little difference at this level: games were decided by pieces left hanging long before anyone's king came under real attack. Castle anyway, early on, because it costs one move and gets a rook into play, but spend your attention on the first three habits.
6. In the endgame, use your king
When most of the pieces are gone, the king stops hiding and becomes a fighting piece: bring it toward the center, where it can help your pawns advance and stop Carol's. A pawn that reaches the far side becomes a queen, so in the endgame, every pawn counts. Our computer player's king makes the same switch when the queens come off.
7. Ask for a hint
The Hint button shows the move Carol would make on Hard in your place, and says why in plain words: a capture, a check, castling, developing a piece, or moving an attacked piece to safety. Try to guess the hint before you look; it's a quick way to learn the habits above.
How often should you win?
Carol has three levels. On Easy, Carol looks only one move ahead; in our tests it beat a player making random moves in every game. Medium looks two moves ahead and follows exchanges to the end, and it beat Easy in every game. Hard looks up to three moves ahead, and beat Medium in 9 of 12 games and drew the rest. Start on Easy, and move up when you're winning most of your games.
For more board games and the habits that win them, see our Checkers and Reversi guides, or browse all our board games.