A Beginner's Guide, Part 5, Now What? Break it down.

Having read A Beginner's Guide, Part 1, How do the pieces move?, A Beginner's Guide, Part 2, Chess Notation, A Beginner's Guide, Part 3, Winning, and A Beginner's Guide, Part 4, Castling, you now know the basics of how to play chess.

However, you likely often wonder why or what you should move. You are able to see that you can move your knight, you can move your bishop, and you can move your Queen, but you have no idea which one of these pieces to move. Even worse, you dont even know how to analyze which of these pieces to move. You have no real goals other than the vague notion of checkmating your opponent's King. Even worse than that, you probably dont have any idea how to come up with real, specific goals. Basically, you have no idea what you are doing. This is when chess gets difficult, and this is generally the stage where beginners give up on chess.

You may have noticed through your study of the basics how complicated chess is. It is really really complicated. As an anecdote, Chess Endgame Tablebases exist for up to 6 pieces. These databases use very simple text notation, yet the files are 1000s of Gigabytes! If you write a 1 page paper on Notepad, the file will be about 1 or 2 kilabytes. To write a 1000 Gigabyte paper (also called 1 Terabyte), you would have to write a 1 billion page paper! This is just for the simple stuff in chess, like Queen, Pawn and King v Queen, Pawn and King. A common phrase in chess (and backed somewhat by math) is that there are as many possible moves in a 40 move chess game as there are atoms in the universe.

So, chess is complicated. This is why it is so difficult to come up with real, specific goals. For every attacking idea you may have, your opponent has 10 to 20 responses. After that, you have 10 to 20 responses. How can you think past 1 move when there are literally 1000s of possibilities? How can you study your game when you are likely never going to see these same moves again? How do we deal with all of this?

Well, lets simplify it. By breaking chess down into categories, we can decrease some of the complexity. By decreasing the complexity of a chess game, we can give ourselves some specific goals. Then, when we have 100s of possibilities to look at, we can find a move that achieves one of our goals and play it. With this framework in mind, you, as a beginner, will not feel so lost and aimless when playing chess.

So, lets simplify a chess game into three stages:

1) Opening

2) Middlegame

3) Endgame

Lets define each of the above.

The Opening of a chess game is the first 10 to 20 moves.

The Middlegame of a chess game is the most complicated portion of the game.

The Endgame of a chess game is the part of a chess game where each side has one to three pieces, not including the King or pawns.

That is pretty easy, right? We havent actually come up with any goals in the chess game, but at least you know what to study next. You need to study Chess Openings, Chess Middlegames and Chess Endgames. [POSTS ALL COMING SOON, You can google these topics in the meantime if you wish.]

To end this post, I am going to provide an analogy that should bring a bit of relief to any chess beginner. You have probably done all of the above (or if you are too young, you will). I am referring to driving a car. After all, the possibilities of driving a car are endless and similar to chess.

At first, you only have some vague goal of getting from Point A to Point B, just like you have a vague goal of checkmating your opponent's King. To get to Point B, though, you just simplify everything, by following a series of simple directions: left on Wilson St, Right on Oak Lane, Right on Main St, and enter the Parking Lot of Big Store.

While you are driving down Wilson St., you dont think too much about all the cars around you. You dont think to yourself, "Ok, there is a Green Ford one car ahead of me, a Blue Honda two cars ahead of me, and a Cheverlot Pick Up Truck three cars ahead of me. A Red Toyota just passed me on the other side, a Blue Toyota just passed me, a Green Ford just passed me. I need to push the gas down to move forward, I need to let off the gas a bit to slow down. etc. etc."

If you did, you would go crazy.

Instead, you have some basic rules of thumb that you follow.

I drive on the right side of the road. I will keep about one or two car lengths between my car and the car in front of me. I will keep my eye on the sides of the road so I can stop quickly if anything jumps in front of my car.

By simplifying the process into various groups, you can ignore a lot of the details that would otherwise make driving impossible. For instance, there is your car, and then there are other cars. Aside from police cars, ambulances and other types of vehicles, it doesnt really matter what type of cars the other cars are. They are just other cars.

As far as Streets go, they also are pretty much the same. It doesnt matter whether you are on Wilson St or Oak Lane, just drive on the right side of the road and stop at the stop signs.

You dont need to think about how far down you push the gas pedal. If you are going to fast, let off the gas and if you are going to slow push down on the gas pedal.

As you will see, you can use this same process to make chess a lot easier. One major difference with the driving analogy, though, is that while you are driving no one is trying to hit you. In chess, everyone is trying to hit you!

Still, though, if you drive you already do the type of thinking that is critical to be successful at chess. It is simply a matter then of transferring that same type of thinking to a new thing. Easy!