Players can choose from hundreds of different openings to begin a chess game, which can lead to infinite strategies.
This week, The Rider spoke with UTRGV Chess Coach and Grandmaster Bartek Macieja to find out why game openings are so important and what players can do to develop their own strategies.
Macieja said the opening in chess consists of moving bishops and knights forward to gain control of the extended center.
“So this is the strategy, [and] one of [the] very important strategies in opening, [is] not to block our own pieces,” he said.
One of the problems players face in the opening is not being able to develop their own pieces because other pieces are in the way. For instance, pawns block rooks, bishops and queens from advancing.
Moving pawns forward helps open up more possibilities to advance other pieces on the board.
“Opening is quite important because it sets the game, like the beginning of the game,” said Kamil Dragun, a grandmaster and UTRGV Chess Team A leader. “If you have a bad position after the opening, it’s difficult to come back to the game.”
In order to learn and add different openings to a game, a player must first understand how to read and write proper notation.
On all chessboards, there are letters lined up horizontally and numbers lined up vertically. A player must use both of these to indicate a position. An example would be e6.
When players move a piece to a new position on the board, they write the letter that indicates that piece and the position it has moved to. An example of using this method would be Bf3. (Bishop moved to position f3.)
The letter for each piece is as follows: K for king, Q for queen, B for bishop, N for knight and R for rook. A pawn does not require a letter in its notation. In the event of a castle, when the king moves two squares toward the rook and the rook jumps over the king, the proper notation is 0-0.
The last step to learning notation would be to note when a player has captured a piece. For this, a player writes the piece’s indicated letter, an x and the position of the piece it captured.
An example of this would be a bishop on f1 capturing a knight on b5. This move is noted as Bxb5.
In order to write notation for the game, the player would write 1. (white’s move) (black’s move) 2. (white’s move) (black’s move) and so on until the end of the game.
By knowing how to read and make notations, a player now can properly keep notes of his or her moves, as well as play out games someone else has played.
One opening Dragun recommends is the Spanish Defense.
The Spanish Defense consists of 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5. This opening moves your main pieces up to control the extended center of the board, which is the goal in opening a game. There will be variations within every game on how to respond to the opponent’s moves.
Beginners will find the Spanish Defense a good way to begin a game and it will provide a solid base for the rest of the match.
