Chess Training Plan For Beginners

Are you interested in learning to play chess? Being able to identify the pieces and knowing how they move are only the initial skills needed by a new player. When you know the basics of the game, how can you improve your chess knowledge? Here are important recommendations that every beginning player should follow:

• Learn Important Chess Openings
• Develop Middlegame Skills
• Practice Endgames
• Solve Chess Puzzles
• Study Chess Tactics
• Analyze Games—Yours And The Masters
• Play Chess Against Robots
• Play More Games
• Develop A Chess Vocabulary
• Wrapping Up

Solving puzzles on ChessKid is a great way to improve your tactical knowledge.

Learn Important Chess Openings

Beginning players often underestimate the importance of learning chess openings. Rather than practicing openings, beginning players sometimes just make initial moves that make sense, such as developing pieces, trying to set up an attack, or avoiding a slipup such as leaving a piece unprotected.

However, popular openings do that and so much more. By being familiar with these openings, you can avoid many pitfalls early in a game. These openings follow basic principles important for the initial phase: attack toward the center, develop the pieces, bring out the queen only when logical, avoid moving the same piece twice early, keep the king safe, and consider castling. At the same time, watch your opponent’s threats and counter them.

As you learn openings, also learn special traps such as Scholar’s Mate and Fool’s Mate. These openings are often attempted against new players. Make sure that you are familiar with them and avoid the typical mistakes. Several lessons on ChessKid introduce these traps so that you don’t fall into them. 

Do you recognize Scholar's Mate?

Players with more experience usually have several favorite openings. Being able to recognize the opening that an opponent chooses gives you immediate confidence and helps you to determine the next moves that you should make. Videos of openings are very helpful. For example, ChessKid has videos about opening traps, as well as these openings that beginners should know:

• Italian Game
• Sicilian Defense
• Scotch Game
• French Defense
• Ruy Lopez
• Queen’s Gambit

In particular, because many beginners have watched the Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit, make sure that you know this d4 opening and how to answer it.

Learning openings helps every player to improve. When you can approach the initial phase of a game with confidence and achieve success, chess becomes much more enjoyable. Applying the principles observed in the popular openings helps create patterns of success for a beginning player.

Develop Middlegame Skills

The phase of a chess game after the opening is known as the middlegame. As this phase begins, you should have completed the development of most of your pieces and taken steps to safeguard your king such as by castling. With your king safe, you want to improve the mobility of your own pieces as you try to gain a material advantage over your opponent (with tactics discussed below) if your opponent’s position has weaknesses or pieces poorly defended.

Practice Endgames

Get better at chess by practicing key positions over and over. Use the Workouts feature on the Learn menu of ChessKid. There you can find basic checkmate patterns such as with one rook, two rooks, or a queen. Can you use two bishops to checkmate an opponent? With Workouts, you can practice these patterns. When you get them right three times in a row, you’ve probably mastered them.

With a rook against a pawn, Black should win this game. Can you win?

ChessKid also has a library of endgame videos. Explore rook vs. pawn endings, active vs. passive defense, endgame transitions, and basic checkmate patterns as well as common endings with a queen, a rook, opposite-colored bishops, or no pawns.

Solve Chess Puzzles

Puzzles are a fun way to improve your chess skills. On ChessKid, you can pick the puzzle theme, such as basic checkmates, defense, endgame tactics, pin, sacrifice, windmill, and much more.

As you solve puzzles, your chess knowledge grows. When you find a similar position in a game, you can evaluate it with confidence. Then you’ll be beating your friends and family members in no time.

Another fun way to solve puzzles is playing Puzzle Duel, a special feature on ChessKid. You compete against a player with similar experience in a timed match. The player who solves the most puzzles in the allotted time wins.

Puzzle Duel on ChessKid is a fun way to learn and compete.

Study Chess Tactics

Solving puzzles is a great way to learn chess tactics. However, tactics are so important that they deserve special attention. ChessKid has lessons on tactics such as the fork, double attack, and deflection that every beginning player should know. By completing the lessons on tactics, a beginning player can advance quickly.

Analyze Games—Yours And The Masters

To improve, you need to avoid past mistakes. Learn from them. Don’t just play games without reviewing how well you played. For games played on ChessKid, each move is recorded for you. Later you can use the Analysis Board of ChessKid to analyze your moves. For other games, you can upload the moves to the Analysis Board and review them.

For games that you play over the board, make sure that you record moves that you and your opponent make. Chess notation is something every beginning player needs to know to be able to advance to the next level.

An important study approach is to review games played by masters. As you explore games by master players, observe their openings. On ChessKid, you can learn from five-time world chess champion Viswanathan "Vishy" Anand who has an extensive series of videos exclusively for ChessKid. See the list of Vishy's chess videos here.

Five-time world chess champion Vishy Anand (left) reviews the training features of ChessKid with FunMasterMike.

Play Chess Against Robots

Playing chess against a robot is not child’s play. It is a serious undertaking. Really! Even playing a robot on ChessKid that moves like FunMasterMike is building chess skills. Do you think you could be FunMasterMike when he was six, eight, or 10? How about when he was a teenager?

What I like to do is select the robot that moves like the FunMasterMike of today. Special note: When you do, select “coach mode” — that way you activate a button to “show help move.” Then the robot guides you to make the best move, and you learn to recognize strong moves.

With the help button (circled) on, the coaching advice is to move the bishop to d3.

Play More Chess Games

On ChessKid, you can play games against friends and clubmates. You can even select the opening to begin a game so that you practice it. When you play a “slow” game, you can ask ChessKid to notify you when it’s your move. For fast games, you can select the time control, such as five, 10, and 15 minutes for each player to complete all moves.

Develop A Chess Vocabulary

As you play more games, you may hear chess terms that you don’t know. What does “en passant” or “stalemate” mean? ChessKid can help because it explains the terms that every beginning player needs to know. As you work on your chess training, make sure that you understand the terms that advanced players use.

Wrapping Up

Every grandmaster was once a beginner, and each one worked diligently to improve their chess skills. You can too with this training plan. If you follow these recommendations, you’ll soon no longer be a beginner, and the chess world will be yours to conquer. 

Finally, if you yourself are interested in teaching chess to kids, ChessKid has prepared an ebook for you if you have been asking, How do I even start a chess program and teach kids how to play chess? This resource is for teachers, coaches, and parents to give them guidance on starting a chess program for kids.