Introduction to Opening Theory
Submitted by
materialkiller on Wed, 05/14/2008 at 4:09pm.
Lesson 1: Understanding Development, Control of the Center, and King Safety.
Why is development important?
For any attack to be successful on any one point the attacker must outnumber the defender my at least one piece. So if we don't bring out only one piece we will only be able to successfully attack unguarded points. A good analogy is think of the starting position as the bench like in baseball. In order to win the game every player must do their part.
Why is the center so important that I need to control it?
Every attack and defense flows through the center. Think of the pictures mound located from the center. Its the ideal place to have the ball to pick off runners because it has the same ditance from all the bases. So the center in chess has the least amount of squares to cover in any given direction so its more flexible.
So we have introduce a key advance strategy is to remain flexible.
Why do I need to castle? Or When do I need to castle? Or Why can't I leave my king in the center?
If we are going to move pawns to control the center. D4 and e4 notice that these pawns do play a important part of shielding the king so are king is becoming expose so simply castling would prevent our opponent of checks which might weaken our position. But that's only one point.
When we castle we also move a rook. And rooks like to "talk to each other". So we are also developing a new piece which will help for our fight for the center.
But I can castle Queenside or Kingside which is better?
Very hard to explain. The basic idea is we never want to castle where our opponent has an attack or where we have move pawns to awkward locations on that flank.
If the center is close we can take more liberties of delaying castle but the general rule of thumb is to caslte early.
Advance Idea: When we evaluate any position we must ask ourselevs is our king safe or do I have an attack upon the enemy king.