Beginners guide to Chess (under 1000 elo) (2024)

Hello, fellow hobbyist. My name is Maurice and I will be your teacher. Your personal teacher for chess improvement. But first you might be wondering what is chess? If you already know or don’t care for the history of chess then you can skip to: The Basics Of Chess by scrolling down.

It seems we do have a curios soul. Let me tell you of the start of chess. Chess is one of the oldest games there is, maybe not older than Go, but Go is a topic for another day.

Today I am purely talking about chess which started around the 6th century in India. Well isn’t that ironic? The birth place of chess gave the chess world one of best chess players of all time, Viswanathan Anand. He was a 5 time world chess champion, the Bobby Fisher of chess, without being insane.

Now the chess invented in India is not the same chess we play today. The original game was called Chaturanga, which would travel along the silk road and into Persia..

The rules of these games had similar ideas and concepts, but the rules were entirely different depending on the culture. Once it came to Europe that is the place where it would later become the modern chess we know and love today. The current form of chess we play today was created around the 16th century.

Now that you know a little bit of the history of the game of chess, we can now take a look at how to play the game.

Let us start of with the most important chess piece: The king. As you scroll down to the picture below you will see a picture of the chess piece and arrows, showing you the squares the piece can move.

As you can see: the king can move anywhere in any direction it wants (as long as it is a legal move). One restriction is that the king can only move one square at a time, no this not checkers where you can jump over pieces to capture them.

Why is the king the most import, well that’s simple if your king gets captured then you lose the game. So it’s important to remember that you never want your king to checkmate, but mote on checkmates later.

The second most powerful piece is the Queen, she is your protector, the one that will keep your king safe. See below for her moves.

As you can see the queen can move in any direction just like the king, but unlike the king. The queen can move as far as she wants in any direction. As long as there is not any piece blocking her way.

The third most powerful piece is: the rook!! (shoutout to Gothamchess) The rook, also referred to as the castle is a very important. See below to look at the moves for this piece.

The rook/castle moves almost like a queens, except it can’t move diagonal like a queen can and there are two of them[.

Our next piece is the knight. The knight is a unique piece in that it is the only piece that can job over other pieces and the way it moves is unlike any other piece. I have provided an Example for you below.

Weird isn’t it? The knight moves in what we call an L shape, two up, down or side to side and one over, either left or right. A knight can be tricky sometimes it can be your best friend and other times it can be the reason you lose the game.

Now we move on to the next piece: The bishop.

The bishop moves Diagonally. This is pretty self explanatory. The bishop can be a pretty powerful piece, but it requires a more in-depth explanation, on tactics, and overall positional understanding, but for this Guide I want to keep it nice and simple.

The finale piece we will be taking a look at is: The pawn. This piece is the weakest piece on it’s own, but once you rank up your chess knowledge it can become a deadly weapon. Below is a picture of how the pawn can move.

The pawn can move on it’s first move either one or Two spaces forward, it is important to know this is only for the first move, after that the pawn can only move one space at a time forward. The pawn is a special piece that can only move forward and never backward. The pawn can also only captured diagonally. That’s all for the pieces. Now it time to move on how to set up the board.

The set up is the same for both sides. You can’t really mess up setting up the game, the only thing you have to keep in mind the queen and king. the queen is always on her own color. Other than that there really isn’t much to comment on. If you have any questions please leave them in the comment section below.

There are a few special moves that every chess player should know. The special moves only effect the king and rook/castle, the other special rules revolve around the pawn.

The most important special role is in reference what we call castling. Below is an Example.

In this position it is whites turn to move and the King and rook on h1 can move at the same time, to preform one move/action. Scroll below to see what white can do.

This is all one move. The king moves over two and the rook moves over two. This action can be done on both sides but works slightly differently. Take a look at the example below.

In this example the king moves over two and the rook moves over three. It is important to mention that you cannot preform this action if an enemy piece is black your path or it will lead to your enemy attacking your king.

Now the special moves for pawns, pawns have two special moves, one when your pawns piece reaches the end of the board, commonly referred to as pawn promotion and en Passant.

Pawn promotion:

If your pawn gets to the last “file” or “rank” of the board then that piece can be transformed into any piece that is not the king. The most common piece that people promote their pawn into is the queen.

En Passant:

As I explained earlier a pawn can only capture forward in a diagonally direction, but some might find a way to exploit this rule. How you might ask? Well what happens if a player uses their pawn’s first move to move past another players pawn? Let’s take a look below.

Let’s say it’s white to move. White would really love to move it’s pawn forward twice and threaten blacks king and rook, legally white could do this, due to the fact the white pawn has not moved at all since the beginning of the game. However black also has a move that can protect from this. You see any pawn that moves past an enemy pawn can be captured so long as the pawn is within the diagonal path.

Now that I have given you a run down on how to play chess, let me provide you with chess puzzles that should give you a better understanding of the game of chess.

Back to Play

White to play

White to play

I would like to thank you for reading my guide on how to begin your chess journey My plan is to make this a regular routine. I love to provide chess lessons and the love of chess. Also I would appreciate it if you please forgive me if this post is not of your chess level. I will be trying to make each post progressively harder so those of a higher elo, so they can receive more benefit. Please subscribe to my Substake to receive new post as soon I release them.