5 Common Mistakes BEGINNERS Make in Chess

What is up guys? As a beginner, chess can be very intimidating. If you're new to the game or if you've only played a little bit before, it can seem like there's an endless possibilities of moves and it can be hard to know what is right and what is wrong. That is why today I'm going to be showing you five different mistakes that I have noticed that a lot of beginners make and I'm going to tell you what you should do instead of those mistakes to improve your chess. Feel free to play a game after this video following my advice and let me know in the comments down below if it worked for you and how it went. The first mistake is not moving your pieces towards the center. When we start out a chess game we want to develop our pieces, so take out our pieces from the towards the center, but a lot of times I will see people moving their side pawns or moving up their knight to the side of the board instead of moving their pieces towards these four squares. Now these four squares are generally the most important squares in a chess game because if you control these squares with your pieces then you'll much easier be able to navigate to both sides of the board. If you only, you know, have your pieces on one side of the board those pieces are going to be pretty stuck and it's going to be a lot harder to move them towards the other side. So to remain flexible you always want to move your pieces towards these squares. When you start a game you typically first want to start out moving your one of your central pawns like this for instance, then you want to move out your knights something like this once again towards the center and then you want to move out your bishops to very quickly be able to castle. Mistake number two is moving the same piece twice. Sometimes, you know, someone will move out their bishop and then all of a sudden they'll say, wait a second, I take that back, I don't really want to have my bishop here, let me just put my bishop over here instead, I prefer this square. But what has happened is that this person has lost what we call in chess a tempo, which basically means a turn. If you move out your bishop first to one square, so first here and then here, then the previous turn of going bishop there it didn't matter, you could have gone all the way here immediately. So you never really want to do this unless one of your pieces is under attack, for instance, if right now this bishop was under attack, then you would want to move the bishop. But if it is not, you don't want to lose a tempo like that because you will give your opponent a bunch of extra turns and then they will have time to place their pieces in the best square possible and, you know, you will just waste time. Mistake number three is exchanging pieces just because of the sake of it. Very often I'll see people just say, oh I can take this knight and be super happy about it because they can take one of their opponent's pieces. But truth is, if you're exchanging one of your pieces for, you know, your opponent's piece, you haven't really gained anything, you've just done an exchange. Now knowing what pieces to exchange or not is a very difficult thing in chess, but what I would recommend is for you always to think about is my piece better than my opponent's when, you know, you can capture a piece. So in this position this bishop is under attack, but here is the thing, right? This bishop is right now pinning this knight, which means that this knight cannot move because if the knight moves somewhere then the queen is going to be captured by the bishop. Now this means that this bishop is basically controlling this knight and therefore, because this bishop is literally, you know, in control of this knight, I would say that this bishop is better than the knight and thus you should not exchange, but instead you should just simply move the bishop back over here. Another thing that is always good to think about is where are your pawns placed? In this position, all of white's pawns or, you know, all of the central pawns are placed on light squares. This means that the light squared bishop is very much blocked by its own pawns. Therefore, in this position specifically, this bishop is stronger than this one because these squares are free for the bishop to move around in. The pawns are not blocking the bishop. Let me go ahead and show you this in a more clear example. Let's say that there is a position like this. If now black's knight, for instance, went to d4, you would not be scared of this knight capturing this bishop because this bishop is really useless as in this point in time all of the pawns around it are blocking it. Bishops are the best in open positions where there's very few pawns because that means that the bishop is not blocked but instead that it can move around to long diagonals. So in this position, this knight is much better than this bishop as this knight is in one of the four central squares, like I said, the best squares of the chessboard. It can move around to a bunch of different places and it's in general more useful for black than what this bishop is. Therefore, as white, you shouldn't be scared about this knight taking this bishop. But for instance, this bishop right here has the ability of going back to f2. It is not blocked by its own pawns and on this diagonal, it could become very, very, very useful. It can also maybe exchange itself for this very good knight. So here we can see how I'm thinking about my different pieces and what pieces I would think are better to exchange than not. But like I said, the most important thing is always to think about what pieces are the ones that are bad in my position and, you know, how can I exchange them. You want to try to keep as many good pieces as possible. So don't exchange your good pieces for your opponent's bad pieces. Mistake number four is not calculating how many attackers and defenders there are in every square. Now what I mean with that is that very often I'll see people simply, you know, moving out, moving to square with a piece and then saying, whoops, wait a second, my opponent really have that many pieces controlling that square? Before you do any move or you're, you know, you're going to be moving one of your pieces, make sure that you see how many of your pieces are attacking a square and how many pieces of your opponent are defending that square. So let's say that you want to go with this knight to d5. Well, what you need to do is that you need to think about how many pieces are looking towards this d5 square. So you have your knight on c3 that's pointing towards the square and you have your opponent e4 that's pointing towards the square. This means that you have two attackers, two pieces are attacking this square. Now black has this knight on b6 defending this square and this knight on f6 defending the square. So black has two defenders but the person that attacks goes first. So when you put up your knight on d5, you are only going to have one attacker left and black is going to have two defenders. So it'll end up with white losing a pawn. But this is something that I think that you should always do when you're going to be moving a piece. Just think about how many attackers do I have of this square and how many defenders does my opponent have? And if you have that rule in mind, it'll be a lot harder for you to blunder a piece. Mistake number five is not using your king in the end game. An end game is the final part of the game where there's very few pieces left. For instance, in this position we can see that only the king and some pawns are left. This would be considered an end game. The king is actually the most important piece of an end game because this is the piece that is going to make you win. If you have an active king you will much easier be able to capture your opponent's pawns and it'll be really hard for your opponent to defend everything. Defending with one king is really difficult whereas attacking with the king is really easy. Let me show you how. In this position I know that a lot of people would just start moving the pawns but before you move the pawns you want to have your king in the most active position. That means going up the board. These are once again the four most important squares. You want to get your king up here and beyond but if you have your opponent your king over here then just like I said in the beginning of the video it's going to be so much easier for you to choose what side to move to, what side you want to capture the pawns. In this end game because there are six pawns left for each player this will not be won by any player unless a player captures the opponent's pawns. If you know if you get one pawn that means that probably one of your pawns will have a free file which means that you'll be able to move move move until it becomes a queen. So in this position the best move would be to go king f4 to move the king up. Now we can see that at this point when the kings are you know having like a sort of standoff this king can choose what side to attack whereas this king doesn't really know what side to defend so it just stays there but the issue is that the king will not be able to stay there forever because you know each player needs to make a move. So in this position black cannot move this pawn because then they will stop defending this pawn and white will be able to capture this pawn. So let's just make a few moves for both players. I'm just going to show you what I want to show you which is that at some point the pawns will have been pushed and the kings will have to start moving. Now a typical misconception is actually thinking that you want to have your pawns as far up as possible in the board but in an endgame a lot of times you want to have your pawns as as far away as possible because you don't want the opponent's king to be able to capture them. We can see now that this pawn would actually be safer on this square than what it is over here as the king can now go and capture it but the issue is that the king before could not move anywhere the king could not go here because then the king would go up here and capture all these pawns and if the king went here well then white will have time to capture the pawns on this side. So if you have an active king in a pawn endgame like this you're almost always winning because at some point your opponent will have to move up the pawns put them in squares that are pretty far up and it will be impossible for your opponent to defend them. So you want to have an active king before you start moving up all your pawns in an endgame. This even is the case if there are rooks on the board. I mean let's go ahead and go back to a position let's go ahead actually let me go ahead and put the king all the way over here just for illustrative purposes let me put the king all the way back over here. White would be better because white has a much easier time getting the king up. I mean it's going to be really hard right now for black to stop the king from going up. Let's say that it's white to move in a position like this so it's white to move the king can go up and it's really hard for black to defend everything because the king is too far away. I mean it's going to be almost impossible for black to defend the pawns and as soon as white starts capturing black's pawns it'll be like a domino effect where we'll be able to capture all the pawns and then win the game because the pawns will come out. So everybody these are five mistakes that I think are very common to make in chess. There's obviously a lot more that I could cover but I wanted to tell you about these five because I feel like these are some that aren't always really talked about. I hope that you enjoy them. I hope that you can bring them to your chess games and I hope that you guys are liking more of the instructional content that I've been doing lately. Thank you so much everybody for watching the video like and subscribe if you enjoyed it as it helps the channel a ton and have a very very very wonderful day. I'll see you all in the next video. Weee!