Basic Chess Opening For Kids Guide

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Opening books for adults stress memorizing opening variations. These are sequences of moves that have been tested in master games. Unfortunately, most kids’ opening books copy this approach. Memorizing is important for advanced tournament play, but not useful or necessary for kids who are just starting out. Instead, the first step should be learning the goals and priorities of opening play, and how each piece can best be used to meet these goals. Kids who absorb these guiding ideas, will learn how to get a strong opening position without having to name or memorize specific variations. In this app, chess-loving children will be introduced to the names and basic ideas of many important chess openings, but for a different reason: to illustrate the basic principles of strong opening play. First, you will learn how to find a strong move for each piece in many different opening situations, and how to get your pieces and pawns working together as an effective team. Only then will we take a closer look at some opening variations, so that kids who want to study further can begin to learn more about using these ideas to understand the goals of specific openings.

What Is the Chess Opening?

Most activities have a beginning, a middle, and an end. In chess it’s not so simple! The opening does mark the start of a chess game, but it means much more. Sometimes it’s useful to think of chess as a battle between two opposing armies. In fact, the chessmen represent typical combatants during the Middle Ages (the years 400-1500 AD), when the modern rules of the game were established. Using this metaphor, the opening is the phase in which you prepare your army for battle. When both sides are fully prepared, the next stage is the middlegame, when plans of attack are devised, to achieve an advantage of position or ‘material’ (having more men), with the ultimate goal of checkmating the enemy king. The endgame is a phase in which many pieces have been traded, so the king is in less danger of checkmate. Then the battle often includes trying to promote a pawn into a queen, and use the extra queen for a checkmating attack.

Here’s something unique about chess – while the opening starts the game, sometimes it’s also the end! In this case we say that one side never made it out of the opening. A player may fail to prepare his forces, or make a terrible mistake and get checkmated right away! Although there are three possible phases of a chess game, many battles never get beyond the opening stage. A good opening gives you much better chances to win the game, so learning the basics of strong opening play is extremely important.

What’s the Goal of the Opening Phase?

This is a great question, because most kids have only a vague idea what they’re aiming for at the start of a game. They make one move here and another there, and may tell you they have a new ‘plan’ each turn. Unfortunately, the plan often has nothing to do with good opening play.

The main goal of the opening can be boiled down to one sentence:

Get your pieces into action quickly and effectively!

Sounds easy, right? But anyone who has played a few games knows that good chess ideas are more complicated than they seem. It takes practice and study to learn how to consistently get your pieces into action quickly and effectively. There are three things to master: what it means exactly to get pieces into action and how to do it quickly, and what makes a move effective. ‘Effective’ is a big word that means ‘able to do things’. Often kids move a piece out quickly, but to a square that isn’t very effective.

Development

Chess players use three main words to describe the process of getting the pieces into the action: Development, Mobilization, and Activation. These three words mean basically the same thing. If you look at the starting position of a chess game, your pieces have very little mobility (options for moving around), which gives them no chance for positive action.