Mastered the Basics? Then You're a Master

Whenever you learn a new activity, you will hear "study the basics" a lot, with "the basics" being the most important and fundamental skills.  Frequently, these are not sexy and even dull, such as artists drawing hundreds of boxes or musicians endlessly drilling their scales. There's nothing artistic about a cube or musical about a scale, but these form the necessary foundation that mastership can be built on.

And if you get good enough, even the basics become beautiful.

Source: https://conceptartempire.com/drawabox-lessons-review/

I have a blackbelt in karate.  Do you know how I stand out from a beginner?  It's not so much that I have "secret karate skills" that a white-belt hasn't learned.  Rather, I do the basics really well, and most blackbelt classes spend most of their time drilling the basics.  Indeed, most advanced karate skills are just the basics done in a certain way or with a slight variation.  After all, at the end of the day, there's only so many ways you can punch and kick someone.

This applies to chess.  Unlike karate, though, the basics of chess are truly vast.  Simply listing the basics will make this one of my longest blog posts.  Actually learning all of this will take even longer.  If you can do it, though, if you can truly internalize all of the basics, then there's a strong argument you are approaching master status.  Like a blackbelt, a chess master doesn't rely on "secret chess skills" to win so much as they do the basics really, really well.

Let's take a look at the chess basics.

Rules and Visual Geometry

I actually skipped this part when I first wrote this draft.  Obviously, you have to know the rules of chess and how the pieces move before you can get good at chess!  This sounds trite, but I have worked with several beginners that had to focus to remember how Knights moved or looked at Bishop diagonals in one-move chunks rather than long, sweeping lines of force.

This is the most foundational step, the basics of the basic.  You look at a piece and know where it can move, without effort.  You can look at a group of pieces and see where they interact.  The Kingside attack starts with seeing how all your pieces can reach f7, for example.  I refer to this as the "visual geometry", of simply seeing what the pieces can do on the board.  Not tactics or calculation, not even pattern recognition, but simply seeing the position for what it is.

This is a real skill.  If you regularly fall for simple one-move blunders, it's likely because you don't see the board well enough.  That comes back to this basic.

The Elements

From here, we expand into the fundamental elements: force (or material), space, time and king safety.  Interestingly, I've seen different authors offer different elements: some have omitted king safety, while others have added pawn structure and piece quality as elements.  It goes to show that even chess experts have a hard time pinning down the absolute basics.

Force: This includes the value of the pieces: a pawn is worth 1, Knights and Bishops 3, Rook 5, etc.  It also informs our first guideline: when ahead in material, trade pieces, not pawns; when behind, trade pawns, not pieces. At the upper end of the skill, we play with the relative values of the piece, and learn when a minor piece is better than a Rook, the Exchange Sacrifice.

Force, or material, is the easiest element to grasp.  If you have more pieces on the board, you are ahead in material.  It's also the most stable: space and time can change fairly quickly, but an extra Queen is an extra Queen and leads to victory.  As such, this is the element chess beginners focus on the most, and with good reason.  Often the novice who takes more of his or her opponent's pieces ends up the winner.

Space: Things now get murky, as I've seen several different examples.  The top google result defines it as "the number of squares in your opponent's half of the board" in which your pieces can move; another simply calls it "control of squares" in general.  One focuses on the four central squares, while another calls it the number of "possible moves".

We immediately see that space, unlike force, is less easy to define ... and yet it is very easy to see.  You can be a complete beginner and yet have no problems telling who has more space here:

Ultimately, force deals with the pieces, and space deals with the board.  It's a territorial concept: the more of the board you control, the more space you have.

Why do we want space?  Well, if we control more of the board, we have more potential squares for our pieces.  Space gives us options, which means it takes away options from our opponent.  This leads to the main guideline: with an advantage in space, avoid piece exchanges; with a disadvantage, seek piece exchanges. 

This is easy to state, but using space well is a hallmark of the modern era.  Computers have shown just how potent space has become, and the openings that give up the most space (KID, Pirc, Modern, Alekhine) are considered almost dubious under the engine's eternal eye.  Modern players are extremely skilled at squeezing a space advantage, which perhaps highlights my main thesis: learning the basics is far from a beginner thing.  It's the thing.

Time: A wise teacher once wrote, "Time is everything."

That's me!

I maintain that time is the least appreciated of the basic elements.  Case in point, a google search for "time in chess" produced hits for only chess clocks (searching for "time element in chess" wasn't much better).  Time encapsulates the idea of the relative value of the pieces.  A Knight is worth 3, but if mine is in the center and yours is in the corner, my Knight is better than yours.  The same material, but a difference in quality.  That's what time gives you.

Time is the most ephemeral of the elements; a lead in time can disappear in one move.  As such, there isn't the same sort of rules we have for the other elements.  Simply put, "When ahead in time, use it."  Attack.  Apply pressure.  Force the issue.  Masters will frequently sacrifice material to further a lead in time and go straight for the kill.  This walks a very fine line, but using time to its fullest is the mark of a good player.

King Safety: Checkmate ends the game.  Nothing else matters if the King is dead.  King safety, therefore, is paramount, which is interesting why some authors don't include it as one of the elements.  The great Siegbert Tarrasch had separate sections for Force, Space and Time in his great book "The Game of Chess," but not a separate section on King Safety.  Of course, the King player a prominent role throughout the book, but the omission is still interesting.

The basics are quite simple: castle early and don't move the pawns around your King.  Conversely, open lines and shatter the pawn cover of your opponent's King to launch an attack.  Easy enough to state, but when both sides are attacking and victory or defeat hinges on a move-by-move basis, few things are harder.

The Interplay of the Elements: The richness of chess becomes apparent when we witness the interplay of these elements.  We might win a pawn but lose some King safety, or we might gain time at the cost of space.  Sometimes the guidelines contradict each other: if I am head in both space and material, should I seek trades or avoid them?  If I have options to win material or go for the weak King, what should I do?  Should I play it safe and just take some space, or should I grab a pawn and allow my opponent counterplay?

How you answer these questions ultimately determines your chess skill.  It's the most basic elements, but they combine and interact in countless amazing ways.  If you master this, and I mean fully master it, you are one heck of a strong player.

And we aren't even done yet.

Stages of the Game

(At the risk of writing a whole novel, I will cut my discussion short and merely go into the most basic parts of what follows.  If you want more, write a comment, let me know, and I'll expand these into bigger, self-contained posts.)

A chess game flows through different stages: opening, middlegame, endgame.  Our priorities shift depending on which one we are currently in.  These priorities can be diametrically opposed, as we'll see, and there is no clear demarcation between stages.  Nevertheless, here they are:

Opening: At the start of the game, we want to wake up our sleeping army.  We call this developing our pieces.  Every turn we want to make our pieces better, to have them fight for the center and control more squares.  The main guiding principle is time; the number one error amongst beginners is collecting stray pawns at the expense of development.  (Indeed, most opening traps involve either grabbing material or making unnecessary pawn moves.)

I wrote a whole course on openings, so I won't rehash it here.  The line is blurry, but once all your pieces are developed and your Rooks are connected, that generally signals the start of the middlegame.

Middlegame: It's impossible for me to summarize everything about the middlegame.  It encapsulates everything about chess.  If I tried, I would say that in the opening we develop our pieces, and in the middlegame we use them: to attack, to defend, to gain space, to provoke weaknesses.  Here is where the interplay of the elements is most pronounced: sacrificing material to attack, or converting a time advantage into a space advantage, are frequent occurrences. All the elements are important, though King Safety is probably the most important.

A sneak peak at a long-delayed project... that will prolly never be finished...

To get really good at the middlegame, you need to get really good at everything else in this post.  This then leads to...

Endgame: As more and more pieces trade, we inch closer to the endgame.  Again, the line is blurry, but once direct checkmate becomes unlikely pawn and promotion is the main winning idea, that's when the endgame has arrived.  Here, the elements shift in importance: King safety is rarely an issue, whereas material and especially time become decisive; endgames are frequently decided on the basis of one move, and passed pawns are the most important currency.

In the previous section, I spoke about mastering the interplay of the elements.  With the stages of the game, it's rather about the transition.  Openings revolve around development, but that rarely matters in endgames.  A King in the center is death in the middlegame but an asset in the endgame.  A passed pawn secures a win in the endgame but means absolutely nothing in the opening.

As such, two skills need to be mastered (beyond getting good at the individual stages).  First, recognizing your assets and steering the game to the appropriate stage (for example, if you have an advantage in King Safety, avoid exchanges to stay away from the endgame). Second, there's the mental aspect.  You might still be thinking about the middlegame (attack and king safety) when the game has shifted to the endgame (passed pawns and promotion).  You need to adapt and focus on the right things depending on the stage of game.  Psychologically, this can be quite difficult.

Conclusion: Keep in mind, this is just the absolute basics.  There are entire books written about a small subsection of each stage, not to mention the large body of theory that has developed.  Those books, though, are mainly about maximizing these elements, at taking these concepts and applying them to their limits. Opening theory, for example, is basically taking the idea of development and applying it in the most accurate and forcing way.  The better you get at the individual stages and their underlying concepts, the easier you will grasp the harder stuff.

It's like karate: most of the advanced theory is just the basics done really, really well.

Common Plans and Pawn Structures

I think of these as middlegame shortcuts.  Certain types of positions occur again and again; knowing what to do greatly improves decision making.  For example, the side with an isolated queen pawn (IQP) should avoid piece exchanges and strive to attack, so in these positions we strive to stay in the middlegame.

Another example, in opposite-side castling situations, the speed of the attack is often more important than material.  Therefore, Time and King Safety matter more than Force and likely more than Space as well.

The basics of pawn structure are straightforward: connected pawns are good and everything else is bad.  Every pawn weakness, at its most basic, is simply a lack of connection: backward pawns, isolated pawns, doubled pawns, all of these are pawns that cannot be protected by other pawns.  Of course, it's easy to state this, but it takes a large amount of skill to take advantage of these pawn weaknesses.

Certain types of structures occur more often than others and are worth knowing in detail. It's possible to go extraordinarily deep here. Off the top of my head, I can think of  Carlsbad, French, IQP, "Capablanca" center (e4 vs d6), Closed Lopez, Open Lopez, Mar del Plata, symmetrical Exchange structures, and about a thousand different fianchetto structures.  Each of these have their own plans and sub-plans, and mastering all of them takes monumental effort.  Fortunately, that isn't required.  A player only needs to really know the most common structures that occur in his or her own games, which varies based on opening repertoire.  Knowing those deeply and the rest more generally is enough to "master the basics", as I'm describing here.

Less optional are the common plans and motif: pawn storms, Greek gifts, rook lifts, minority attacks, these are universal and apply to a huge swath of positions.  There are fewer plans than pawn structures ... but still too many for me attempt to write a full list.  If you don't know a plan, you are effectively blind to certain possibilities.  Learning plans then feeds into pawn structures, as certain plans make far more sense in certain structures.

To give a concrete example, in a standard Dragon position, you shouldn't worry too much about Rook lifts but should worry a lot about the coming pawn storm. Knowing this helps you focus on what matters in a position and simplifies how to find a move.

Overarching Universal Concepts

Certain concepts transcend the three stages discussed above.  Development matters most in the opening and passed pawns matter in the endgame, but the initiative applies universally.  You always want the initiative, and the moves that fight for it are often the best move, period, regardless of stage of game.

I only know of three such concepts: the initiative, tension and the attack.  All are somewhat murky concepts, but they apply basically everywhere.

• Initiative: Essentially determines who is calling the shots.  If I attack and you react, then I have the initiative.  If I attack and you counter-attack, you are fighting for the initiative.  In some positions neither side can apply any pressure, and so the focus shifts to finding ways to start attacking in the future, such as piece maneuvers or pawn exchanges.
• Tension: Typically phrased as "Keep the tension" or "Don't release the tension."  Essentially, if pieces or pawns can exchange, the side that initiates the exchange frequently ends up worse off.  We want to force our opponent to initiate the exchange, and so we keep the tension.  This is hard to explain without examples, and this post is long enough, so watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxapM2jmuAY
• Attack: Also known as forcing moves.  This one is less universal but still very important: in general, the most forcing moves are powerful, or at the very least, they must be considered.  If a forcing move (check, capture, threat) works, then it pushes your opponent back and may just win the game on the spot.

 This gives a general thinking algorithm: in any given position, we want to keep the tension, fight for the initiative and look for the most forcing moves.  Again, this is easy to say, but there's a world of difference between knowing something and applying it on every move.  If you fully learn this step alone, if you look for these ideas on every move, you will find very good moves.

Tactics and Calculation

This is a good stepping stone into basic tactics and calculation.  The two go hand-in-hand.  Again, definitions are murky, but essentially calculation is something that you do (a process going in your head) whereas tactics are something you see (interactions that you can spot on the board).  You might calculate several moves ahead to see a potential fork, for example.

This entails two things.  First, there's the process inside your head.  Common wisdom suggests looking for forcing moves: checks, captures, threats.  Look at those moves first and foremost, and then see what happens.  This will help you spot the vast majority of tactics.  It's also crucial to check for hanging or undefended pieces, another tell-tale sign.

In terms of tactical patterns, there are dozens upon dozens of themes, though a core few (pins, skewers, forks, double attacks, discovered attacks, removing the defender) occur far more often than others (attraction, interference, swallowtail mate).  "Knowing the basics" means having the most common patterns on auto-pilot, with the most obvious examples jumping off the board when you look at it.

 Interestingly, I think this is the basic we practice the most but use the least.  That is, we all do lots of tactical puzzles, but we frequently miss simple tactics in our own games.  Why?  Frequently, it's because we aren't thinking about forcing moves or looking for undefended pieces.  Imagine for a moment if you always checked the forcing moves and always spotted hanging pieces: your rating would likely jump hundreds of points.

Good players don't have secret skills.  By and large, they simply do the basics really well.  This is a huge example.

Theory

Learning "the basics" necessitates learning some theory, but what counts as "basic theory"?  This can go to extremes: Reuben Fine's "Basic Chess Endings" has "basic" in the title and runs 600+ pages.  Opening theory stretches even deeper.  There's even an element of knowing the classic games of the past, Morphy and Lasker et al.  All of this adds to our basic body of theory, our knowledge of chess itself.

Seriously, it's a huge book.

How much theory do we need to know?  I doubt 99% of the serious chess-playing population knows all the "basic chess endings" Fine wrote about.  Nobody knows all opening theory.  We certainly don't need to know everything.  We probably don't "need" that much, actually.  Let's arguably say the fundamental checkmates (lone Queen, lone Rook, two Bishops, Bishop and Knight), basic King and Pawn, basic Rook and pawn (Philidor, Lucena positions) and then, for openings, the first 10 moves in your most common opening variations (or until all pieces are developed, whichever comes first).

That's probably the most that you "need" to know.  Learning more would be "nice" but probably not essential, and I'm not sure it qualifies as basic.  This minimum amount of knowledge already puts you ahead of a large chunk of players, and if you want to add more, that shows the power of the basics, and how it can take you even further.

Fundamental Positional Knowledge

I'm going to cheat here and basically not talk about this at all. Instead, I'm just going to copy and paste from Alburt & Palatnik's "Chess Strategy for the Tournament Player".  Here is the table of contents:

1. Good and Bad Bishops
2. Bishops of Opposite Colour
3. Cutting of a Piece
4. Bishop > Knight
5. Knight < Bishop
6. Bishop Pair
7. Fighting on the Long Diagonals
8. Open Files and Diagonals
   
9. Weak and Strong Squares
10. Complex of Weak Squares
11. Weak and Strong Pawns
12. Significance of the Center

That's a pretty good list.  GM Seirawan's "Winning Chess Strategies" covers essentially the same stuff.  If I tried to simplify this further, I'd say positional knowledge essentially determines which piece is good or bad in any given position.

We can also think of what our pieces "want": Knights want outposts, Bishops want open diagonals, Rooks want open files, Queen wants weaknesses to attack, King wants safety.  If there's lots of juicy outposts and few open files, then sacrificing our Rook for their Knight might be positionally justified.  This alone might qualify as "the basics," though again, there's a world of difference between knowing this and applying it regularly in our games.

Conclusion

I've written 3,000 words on chess basics.  Perhaps I could have done it better, but this proves my thesis: chess is incredible complicated, and just learning "the basics" takes not only enormous work, it likely puts you ahead of the vast majority of players.

Let's imagine a hypothetical player, one who understands the interplay between force, space and time, one who always develops pieces in the opening, attacks in the middlegame and prioritizes passed pawns in the endgame, one who always calculates forcing moves and knows the most common tactical motifs, one who knows the most common plans and pawn structures, one who fights for the initiative, keeps the tension and strives to attack on every move, one who knows the most common opening and endgame theory, and one who knows the most fundamental positional factors.

That player is probably a master.

As amateur chess players, we don't need to learn advanced concepts or have detailed knowledge.  We just need to know the basics really well.

[And if you read this far, today's my birthday!]