Tag Archives: chess moves
In this post of the tactics series I’ll discuss X-rays and windmills. Despite their descriptive names, these two tactics are relatively rare. Let me say if you succeed in trapping your opponent in a windmill you can win his entire army! The X-ray tactic occurs when a piece ‘sees through’ an enemy piece towards a […]
In my opinion these two tactics are overlooked and not studied in enough detail. Imagine that you’re in the middle of a tough chess match. You notice that you can make a strong capture or check, unfortunately however one of your own pieces is in the way. That’s where a clearance sacrifice comes into play. […]
As Christmas gets nearer, I thought we should continue with our series covering basic tactics. First let’s just do some quick definitions so we can get a basic understanding of these two tactics. Deflection is exactly what you would think. An enemy piece is guarding an important square or piece. If we can find a […]
In my last post I discussed discovered attacks. Technically, discovered attacks and discovered checks are forms of double attacks. I decided to do two separate postings because this tactic is so common and important. Learning the exact terminology isn’t the goal here, what’s important is recognizing the patterns and being able to incorporate them into […]
In the last blog, I covered mating with a King and Rook. The idea was to box in the opposing King into a smaller and smaller area of squares until in the end you use your king to take away his final square and checkmate with the Rook. We’re going to use a similar idea […]
Sooner or later in your chess games, you’re going to have to learn how to win with a limited number of pieces. It may even be down to you having 2 pieces (for the sake of this blog a King and a Rook) and your opponent is left with only 1 piece (a King). There […]
“The pin” is one of the most powerful tactics you can have in your arsenal of attacks. No, I’m not talking about putting anyone’s shoulders on the ground and there are no 3-counts. Think of chess more as a war game than anything else… and “the pin” is when you’re attacking so heavily that […]
“The Fork”, believe it or not, does NOT have anything to do with the widely used eating utensil! The fork, in chess, refers to when a piece is in a position that it threatens two pieces simultaneously. This may also include putting your opponent in check while attacking another piece (this is a highly effective […]
I was originally going to write this article telling you that when you play chess with someone, you should behave as if you were playing chess with yourself. Then I realized this might not work out so well, because when we play chess with ourselves (where we’re playing both sides of the board), we sometimes […]
Now that you know notation, we can start looking at some positions and games and analyzing, etc. In other words, now you can really start to learn to become a better chess player by reading books and blogs and solving puzzles, etc. Let’s look at a few simple checkmates that are standard 1st time player […]
