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Home | Learn Chess | Chess Shoppe | Links | Glossary
Learn to Play Chess
Course Home Page
by Joe Iannandrea
Introduction:
Chess is a rich and rewarding game that is enjoyed in every country in the world. You can spend a lifetime with chess and never exhaust all of it's possibilities, yet can be taught how to play chess in a single sitting. Chess has a difficult to define quality that makes it uniquely fascinating to many newcomers yet is continuously rewarding no matter how far they may go with it. More than just an enjoyable way to pass the time however, chess enriches those who have made it a part of their life. (For more on the benefits of playing chess see our article Chess the Brain & Well Being.)
It's important to get the right start however. A summary of just the bare minimum you would need to know in order to play a game of chess would only take a few minutes for you to read through, but if you tried to learn the game this way you'd be feeling lost pretty quickly, and after a bit of head scratching you'd probably give up and try something else. The experiences you could potentially miss out on if you tried this however would make this a near tragedy. Luckily there are better ways.
What the "Learn to Play Chess" mini-course was created to do was teach you how to play chess the right way, so you'll be confident you know the rules and ready to go on learning. This means the rules you learn here are the universal standard understood anywhere in the world you go. It also means not only learning the rules, but the terminology and other conventions used communicate chess ideas, and much of the background information you'll need to give you a solid foundation on which to build your understanding of the game. The purpose here isn't really to directly give you the skills needed to get the upper hand on your opponent (though you'll forgive me for the occasional useful tip that may get slipped in in passing). What it will do is give you the base of knowledge you'll need to go on to build those skills. Most importantly however you'll be able to play chess confident that, while opponents may not fear you just yet, you'll understand how the game is played as well as any grandmaster.
Who is this course for? Since it teaches the game from the ground up it's for complete newcomers to the game who has little idea how chess is actually played. Since it is complete it is for those who may have played before but, perhaps because it's been a while, need a good refresher to be sure they understand everything as well as they once did. And since it's broken down by subject it's for those who may play chess but aren't sure they learned everything quite right, either because it was learned from the two page pamphlet that came with the chess set or perhaps a self appointed chess expert who may have injected a few rules of their own. Whether you go through the entire course or just skip to a subject you need clarified. I hope this course will be a launching point for all the enjoyment and other benefits that come from a lifetime with chess.
Course outline:
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