Magnus Carlsen's favorite Opening; Ruy Lopez

This right here is Magnus Carlsen's favorite opening, and in the next couple minutes you will learn how to play the opening like the world champion. The Ruy Lopez is also played by Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov. So if you want to improve at chess faster than everybody else, this will help you tremendously. You're about to learn how the strongest world champions play the opening. Most Ruy Lopez guides are really stale videos that show you a dozen different variations to memorize, but don't worry. Instead of memorizing a hundred boring and confusing moves, we will go through the individual missions of your pieces. That will make it much easier. And also, I will show you how to play the middle game after the opening, because what's the point of achieving a certain position if you don't even know how to play the middle game after that. Your first move is E4. I think the mission of your pawn is quite obvious. Conquering the center squares and opening the diagonals for the queen and the bishop. Black usually responds with E5 to take back some of the center space and to stop you from playing D4, which would take over the entire center. The Ruy Lopez opening mainly resolves around conquering the center. Why? Look at this knight. It's attacking only three squares and the value of these squares isn't really high. What's the point of defending this pawn? Nobody is going to take it anyway. If the knight was positioned more to the center of the board, it would attack eight squares at the same time. If the knight was positioned in the center of the board, it would be even more dangerous, attacking the enemy's second rank. Combined with other pieces, this could become a dangerous threat. Obviously this knight can easily be pushed back. That's why both sides are trying to conquer the center. Once you conquer the center for yourself, you can place your pieces in those good positions and you can stop your opponent from doing so. We play knight F3, attacking the center pawn. After that, the knight just waits and Black plays knight C6, defending the center pawn. Now this bishop attacks the knight. Let me explain the bishop. Remember that the knight is defending the E pawn. Let's say they play some move like this. You can take the knight, removing the defense of the E pawn. Now you can take the pawn. But here's a problem. They just bring out the queen. There's no way to save both your knight and your pawn. You'll have to retreat your knight and your pawn is gone. So let's go back. You can only take the knight and then take the pawn if the queen can't recapture your pawn after that. Later in the game you might have a position like this. Now your pawn is protected and you can safely execute your bishop's mission by taking the knight and then taking the pawn. So in a normal game your bishop just sits here and waits. Once this pawn is in safety, you can execute the mission. Obviously if your bishop is attacked, you'll have to retreat it. Maybe even twice. I don't think I need to explain why losing a piece is bad. Your rook's mission is extremely simple. Let's talk about that. By the way real quick, you just saved yourself hours of memorizing moves. There are plenty of variations that differentiate by whether or not you should trade the bishop for the knight. The simple explanation with the safe pawn replaces all that. And the rook's mission is even simpler in my opinion. Make sure to subscribe right now. I will make it as easy as possible for you to improve at chess. Your rook's mission is to go to E1. I mean you can also study all these variations or you just go to E1. It's a lot easier to play and it's also the more aggressive option. These are mainly used to draw the game. Chess page viewers don't draw. There's just one problem. Let me show you. You want your rook on E1 to defend your pawn because your bishop is waiting for the pawn to be safe. But what if they instantly attack your pawn? If you castle now, they might take your pawn. Here's the extremely complex solution. Play rook E1 anyway. Do you see what's going to happen here? Your original plan to defend the E pawn may have failed. But it failed successfully. Always go to E1. If they took your pawn, the knight now has to retreat. And your rook stares at the enemy king with a double attacked pawn in between. The king is reconsidering the life decisions that led to this moment. If you take the dude, the situation is even more dangerous with a potential discovered check. If you know how to handle this, you can basically win the game on the spot. If you think it's just go here with the knight and boom check and you take the queen. It's not that easy because we have to assume your opponent is in possession of a brain and will defend your threat. But I consider this scenario more a part of the middle game. So we will go through an example game later that explains how to win this position. First we should finish the opening moves. We have covered the knight and the bishop in this rook to E1 thing. Now we will talk about these two pawns and after that we can learn how to play the middle game. The two pawns, surprise surprise, want to conquer the center. It's impossible to predict how the board will look like when you push, unless you study an unbearable amount of variations. To make it simple, I will leave out the black moves and just show you the basic idea. You push C3 with the idea of later pushing D4. If they don't take, just leave your pawn there. If they do take, you take back and achieve center superiority. There's an important thing missing right now, but I will show you what that is in the second example game. It's much easier that way. For now all you have to understand is this attack idea. Let's talk about the middle game plan. We talked about the knight, the bishop, the rook and the pawn so far. If you don't remember what these pieces do, consider re-watching because that's really important. Now you'll learn how to play the middle game. Let's say the opening went something like this. Now you're in the middle game. Keep in mind that the specific moves don't matter right now. All you have to understand is the basic game plan. Your plan for the middle game is a kingside attack. So you want your pieces on the kingside of the board and the enemy pieces on the queenside. This knight for example can hop all the way over the board to G3. It looks silly. But your center control and space advantage allow you to build up a big attack and your opponent simply doesn't have enough space to build a proper defense. You will often see a queenside counter-attack. They try to push pawns, which is okay, it's actually kind of good for you. If they don't do that, you can even start messing around with the pawns supported by your rook, hoping that your opponent will move pieces to the queenside to defend. If they move pieces to the queenside, it will weaken their kingside. That's just an option in case they don't initiate the queenside attack first. This bishop weirdly already is in a good position. Just leave it there until you find a good attack move. You'll see that in the second example game. So the quick summary is. All pieces attack kingside. Pawn and rook mess around on queenside to distract your opponent. Let's move on to the example games. They will show you how to execute that game plan. These are the standard Royal Lopez opening moves. If you remember the mission of the bishop, it's now waiting for the pawn to be safe. And the pawn will be, once the rook is on E1. But black attacks with the knight. White castles anyway, sacrificing the pawn. And the rook goes to E1 anyway. Black retreats. This bishop is under attack, but the main thing in this position is the E-file. White takes E5 with the knight and we end up with this dangerous situation. In this example game, white wins because of massive center control. The second game shows a bigger strategic approach with a kingside attack. Black takes. And instead of taking back with the rook, white brings out the knight. You'll see why. The black knight is pinned anyway, it can't move. Black takes the bishop. Now white finally takes on E5 and black has to block. And this is why you should bring out the knight instead of taking right away. The knight can now go here and the pinned bishop is double attacked. Excuse me what is this center control, what opening do you know that just randomly allows you an attack like this? A rook and a knight in the 5th rank can move 9. That's ridiculous. So black castles to unpin the bishop, and white takes it. Now white brings out another threat, the queen. This is a common trap and there are plenty of those. The reason for that is the massive center control earlier in the game. Here black brings the pony to safety. And white sacrifices the queen. Double triple exclamation mark brilliant move. He must be subscribed to chess page 1, because this is forced checkmate. The king has to take back and the rook ends his career. But even more important is the second game. It shows a solid black defense. This time, we will need to break the defense. The game starts with the standard moves and after that you'll see how to dominate the game positionally. In this game, black attacks the bishop, so it has to be retreated. Remember you can't take when your own pawn isn't safe. Black threatens to take the e-pawn and of course white just castles. But this time, black doesn't take the suspicious pawn and instead puts the bishop on the e-file, completely wiping out our chance to dominate the center with a strong e-file as you saw in the first game. The rook still goes to e1 to defend the pawn. But again, black is smart. Black knows that once the pawn is defended, white can trade pieces and win a pawn as we covered in the opening section of this video. So black blocks the bishop out of existence. White has to retreat it again. You know all these things. But here's something you didn't know yet. Black plays d6. D6 is now defending the pawn on e5. Until now, this knight has been defending the e-pawn. Now that this pawn is defending it, the knight is free to move. It can now potentially go here. In that case, the bishop doesn't have any escape. We would be forced to trade. Do we want that trade? The bishop is attacking the king side and the enemy knight is stuck on the queen side. Considering our game plan, what do you think? Should we accept this trade? There are no wrong answers but if you choose to trade, you are not only wrong, you are also stupid. We don't want this trade. Let's put the knight back because it's your turn first. Whenever they push d6, you immediately push c3 to create an escape for the bishop, in case they put the knight here. C3 is part of your pawn push plan anyway. Black hassles because the knight thing isn't doing much anymore. In this situation you might be thinking okay, so this bishop isn't in the original position anymore. There is no way this knight will get the pawn and the rook is already on e1. Time to push d4. Yes but no. One quick thing. Imagine this bishop going here. That's really annoying. That's why you should push h3 as soon as you find the time to do so. Now the black bishop develops to b7, which is a lot better for you. Now finally, the big plan. You can push d4. Insert evil laughter. If this was a high elo game, your opponent wouldn't take. But the majority of players below 1800 actually do take. You take back and boom you have the center. Okay cool, but we still have to use this strong center to attack the king's side. At this point there are many many possible moves but in this game that I found on Leeches, the next move was d5, challenging the center. White pushes the pawn, establishing a space advantage on the king's side. And the space advantage and center control already begin to pay off. Look at the knight. Here it wouldn't be able to go forward anymore. Here the same thing. So he decides to put it in the center. But it can easily be attacked. Usually our knight wants to go attack the king's side. But this player chose to use the knight to challenge the center. Valid decision in this case. We'll see a big king's side attack in a couple moves. He is doing just fine. Hippity hoppity. The knight attacks the bishop. The bishop can hide on c3. Black takes the knight and white takes back. Nothing too complicated. But now you can see the exact dynamic I was talking about earlier. Black attacks the queen's side. Seems like a good idea when white controls the king's side. Speaking of which, instead of trying to fight on the queen's side, white puts another piece, the queen, in a good position to attack the king's side. To avoid checkmate, black pushes the pawn. And remember this bishop? I told you to leave it here and wait for a good attacking move. Your time has come little boy. This is extremely annoying and will later contribute to the absolute destruction of the king's side. The rook has to move away. Now there's not much to do on the king's side. Remember what we said about this rook? White uses it to mess around on the queen's side, trying to stay in control of the game. It does work. The next couple moves happen on the queen's side. Nothing too interesting. The interesting part is this. Black moves the rook to b8, attacking the queen. Not only are two rooks worth more than a queen, on top of that the king is in a weak position. White decides to take. Black takes and white takes again. Check. The rook now puts the king in danger and the king can't move at all because of the bishop. You might argue this is a queen's side attack, but it only works because of the menacing king's side bishop. Black blocks the check with the bishop, supported by the queen. And white can double attack the pinned bishop. The king goes to safety and the bishop vanishes. Black takes a pawn. And what you're about to see is the beauty of the royal opus. The king is already in a bad position. A weak king's side is dangerous, as every single tiny mistake can end fatal. The bishop attacks the king. Only one square is left for the king, and now comes the rook. This would be checkmate in two moves. However, black finds the only way to avoid this checkmate, which is to take the knight, sacrificing the queen. But still, there is no way out for the king. Black hopelessly pushes the pawn. White prepares the checkmate. Black can't stop it and pushes the pawn again. The bishop attacks and the rook covers this square, the only square left for the king is this one. White brings the rook in position. The king can't move at all. The position is bad enough, even if black had more pieces, he could not defend this. This checkmate is inevitable. The attack is too big. Checkmate. But, what is the secret to winning? How did a knight become more valuable than a queen? And how can even a queen sacrifice not stop a checkmate? First of all, congratulations, you just learned the most important parts of a highly complex and strategically dominant opening. And if you learn how to position your pieces, your knights will be more powerful than your opponent's queen. But there's one problem. The strategic power of the royal opus is ridiculous, but no matter how good you are, you're not even wide half the games. That's why I highly recommend you learn the Caro-Kann, a dominant yet easy to learn opening for black. I give you my word, you will see it's a lot easier to learn than the royal opus, so watch it right now unless you want to be sad and lost every time you play black.