Chess Lessons for Beginners #3 - The Importance of the Center!

For chess players who are just starting out, it is very important to learn the basic principles of the beginning of the game, aka the opening!

I started my chess column here on steemit with two posts on some basic checkmates, but to get to checkmate you need to first start off your games well!

So, let's go back to the beginning...

Chess Opening Principle #1 - The Center is Super-Important!

The first principle that I will cover will be the importance of the center of the board.

All chess diagrams made by @beauknows with the help of the chess.com analysis board and the Google chrome "awesome screenshot" plugin.

If you look at the diagram above, you see the 4 central squares highlighted in red, e4, d4, e5, and d5. These are perhaps the 4 most important squares on the chess board. The 12 central squares immediately surrounding these 4 squares are also considered the center of the board, and in general, this 16 square center is where you want your pieces to head to in the beginning of the game.

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Let's Start With the Pawns

Here we see on the left that both players have made 2 opening moves. White has moved his pawns to e4 and d4. Black has moved her pawns to a6 and h6.

The right diagram illustrates the central area that white is controlling, while black just nips at two squares close to the edge.

Also important to note is that by moving his two central pawns, both of white's bishops and his queen can jump out to the middle of the board too. Whereas again black didn't really accomplish much.

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A Knight on the Rim is Dim!

Knights cover a lot more squares in the center than they do on the edge, thus the famous chess maxim, "a knight on the rim is dim."

Looking at these two first moves. White made a great move, bringing his knight to the f3 square in the center of the board and attacking no less than 8 different squares.

Black on the other hand brought the knight to the edge to the silly a6 square, and from that vantage point only hits 4 squares.

The more squares you cover, the more space you control and the more options you have. This is true of knights and all of the other pieces too!

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Bishops Usually Belong in the Center Too!

In general, you are going to want to bring your bishops to the middle of the board as well. Like the knights, they target more squares from the center than they do from the edge.

In this example, both players have moved a pawn and a bishop. White has made a central pawn move claiming space in the middle of the board. Furthermore, he has brought his bishop to the middle targeting all sorts of squares.

A bishop on the rim is usually stronger than a knight in the same place, but here you see it still has less scope than his centrally placed counterpart. In this case you see that white attacks 12 different squares while black only covers 7.

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How Strong Can Centrally Placed Bishops and Knights Be?

Well, look at these two diagrams.

As a team on two of the central squares, the bishops cover wide swaths of the board.

Believe it or not, the much slower knights on the central squares like this actually cover almost half of the board too!

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That's it for this lesson today. I hope you enjoyed it and please upvote and follow me for more beginner's chess lessons on steemit!

My Previous Chess Lessons

Chess for Beginners #1 - The Ladder Checkmate
Chess for Beginners # 2 - Checkmate with your Queen!