Do This Against Unusual Chess Openings

If you're a beginner or intermediate chess player like myself, then there is a lot you don't know about the game, especially when your opponent plays an opening you've never seen before. But I'm gonna use one of my games to illustrate how playing fundamental solid chess can overcome even overwhelming odds. Let's go. I'm gonna use one of my games to illustrate this point about playing fundamental chess. My opponent has the white pieces, opens with NC3. And this is not standard for me. I don't see this very often. I see E4, D4 most of the time, unless they're gonna play on the wings over here. So I responded by mirroring my opponent. Okay, I didn't take, I know that one of the rules is to take space in the center, but I didn't do that in this because I expected them to go something like D4, like a queen spawn opening, but they responded with this, which is really tough for me because I can't take because they take back immediately. And immediately what I'm thinking is that they're going to push this pawn to try to push me around. So I decided that I was going to respond by blocking it. Take space in the center, block it. This is not because I'm an expert. I am not. I am a beginner to intermediate player, but I knew that I did not want my opponent to push this pawn anymore. So I had to block it. I wanted to develop normally. That is always my plan when I play someone who uses an opening I don't understand. Okay, and this threw me immediately for a loop because I see that they want me to take a gambited pawn. And one of my other rules that I play by is never take a gambit. I just don't do it because I know that the people who play them know what they're doing. No pawn is free in an opening, usually. So what I responded with was not seen very great by the engine. They wanted me to move to the center, but I thought that I could protect the center. That was my thinking, was I would protect the center. And my opponent then made a terrible move, but I know what they were thinking. Like I knew that they knew I couldn't pin them, but that's usually what I do is I pin knights to queens. Like if the center pawns have been moved out, I pin the knights to the queens. But I still don't have a great response. Even though it's a blunder, I don't have a great response. Okay, I should have probably taken, but I didn't because I thought there would be something, you know, weird about it. So instead I made a blunder of my own and went down nearly three material points. So I moved my bishop out because I wanted to develop so that I could castle as soon as possible. But it's not a good move, obviously because of what happens next. It wasn't until after my opponent takes that I see, oh my goodness, I am being attacked and I can't take. And I can't really move anything out. I have to move my knight. And that's another tip that I want you to take away from this is that the first thing you must do is protect your pieces. So I knew I could move back, but I didn't want to undevelop my knight. I thought I would like it better if I took a riskier move, but continued development. Because I think that I can eventually put something here, but I am losing a bunch of space. Like look, the pawn controls here. This pawn controls here, controls here. The knight controls here, here, here. They're really taking up a lot of the board. And that's one thing I'm learning is that taking up space in the squares that you control is really important. So if you're a beginner player, think about not just where the pieces are and what you can take, but what all your opponent controls. And so the only thing I saw that they didn't control, I knew I couldn't go here, and I couldn't go here. These are all squares that are taken. I didn't want to go here because I didn't want to undevelop. And I didn't want to move right here because you get an immediate attack. So what I did instead was I moved right here, which was the best move apparently given the situation. But I knew that this would probably be attacked as well because we have this pawn up here, which can come. We got, if we move out here, then we're attacking and looking at all of these squares. So my opponent is taking a huge lead in development. They are taking their pieces out and I am moving around. One rule that you want to follow is not move a piece more than once before you castle. And I've moved this knight twice, not good. So then after my opponent does exactly what I feared, I think I probably should have traded and just gone down a little bit, but I didn't want to do that because now my opponent is taking up even more space. These center squares are really important and my opponent had all of them taken. And I'm just losing because not only did I have to move this piece once, now I'm going to have to move this piece twice, I have to move this piece twice. So I'm backing up. I'm continually giving more material away. And according to the computer at this point, I am four points down. So I am down four pawns at this point. I have not developed this light squared bishop. I have no pawns in the center. So there is no reason I should be able to come back and win this game. But I knew I was going to keep going because I hadn't made a terrible blunder yet. I hadn't lost a piece yet. So I was going to keep playing and luckily my opponent made a mistake. Now they see that their piece is protected. So what they want to do is lure my queen out. And if I didn't take time to look, I might've done that. Like, oh my gosh, free piece. Oh no, my queen. So what I did instead was I started the process of developing because I also needed to protect, whoops, I also needed to protect my knight. So when you're in one of these situations, I know that it's tough because you want to get out of it. You want to develop and you want to start attacking and all that stuff, but you have to look at every piece and where it's going. That is one of the biggest modes of blunder that I see in chess for myself and for other people at lower ratings is because I coach chess. I see that people don't look at where pieces are and what it reveals when you move a piece. So when my opponent moved this piece, it revealed this attack right here. Whoops. It revealed this attack right here. So I had to defend it. And now my opponent made a blunder. I didn't really see it as a blunder because I knew I was still looking at this right here. So that is the best move apparently, but I knew something like this was coming. So I knew I had to develop. I knew I needed to get my bishop out. So this is not seen as a good move, but I knew I needed to get something in the center, okay? And I was hoping that I could get equal, equalize, and then develop castle and keep going. I'm still down, but I am less down. So my opponent has made some aggressive moves that are not great. So in this, I know why my opponent did this. And one thing I'm doing during my games is I'm thinking about what my opponent wants to do rather than panicking about what I should do next, like where all things could go wrong. Instead of do that, I am looking at what they're looking at next. And when they're looking at next is checkmate because the queen is protected by the knight. So I did all that I knew to do. I castled, that protects me from checkmate. I'm still not looking great here. I have a bad center. Like look, all those pieces are right there. I have nothing right there. I have this guy, which is in not good shape. I have a bunch of attackers going for me, not good. So my opponent helps me out by castling instead of developing a piece. I take, and then when they take, I have a couple of things that I'm looking at. So you always have to pay attention to this stuff. Okay, so I see here, that's an attack, right? That takes the piece and attacks the queen. I see this is check, but I also see that this rook is looking directly at my queen. So while I'm playing chess, I have to look at all the possibilities. I don't always do that. I don't always make great decisions and I don't always look the way that I should, but that's something you should go into each game doing. And if you're not doing that, you're probably playing on tilt and you need to take a break. So what I did was I moved out of the way, hoping that my opponent wouldn't do something drastic because I knew I have check here, okay? And I have this move. So I was hoping my opponent would make a mistake. They attack me. So this is, I think it's a good move because it's attacking me and forcing me to look elsewhere. But then I know I still have check. So I started with check, which apparently is a bad move, but I thought, hey, that's okay because then the queen can take. And then I didn't really think about the fact that once I can't now take this knight because the queen is looking at it and I'm still under attack. So what I do instead is I take here because it's free. My opponent attacks here. I'm okay with that. I should have taken. That's what I should have done here. But I moved my knight out of the way because I wanted to protect myself. And once my opponent takes, I take back thinking that perhaps I can, what I'm thinking in this moment is that the queen is protecting this piece. Maybe I can move my rook out. And then this square is protected by my knight. So we've got a lot of stuff that can happen here in the middle because I also know that this is, it's not quite a passed pawn, but it could become one because the only pawn that could fight it is right here, okay? So after that, my opponent solidifies. I don't, it sees, the computer sees it as a blunder. I'm not good enough to see that because what I was thinking was this protects this pawn so that now the queen can move, right? And it also connects the rooks. One tried and true rule about chess is that you want your rooks connected. So my response was to take the piece here with my bishop, which connects my rooks, and it also attacks this rook. So I know he's gonna have to move it. And even in this moment, I knew that likely what would happen is that someone would come over and then I'd have to move my bishop again. But I wanted that immediate counter-attack. I didn't want my opponent to keep building toward an attack on me. And instead, something happened that I didn't expect at all, which was an attack on my queen. I'm still watching this center because this is where all of the fight is. So I move my pieces away and I get attacked, my bishop gets attacked, so I pull it away. And this is where things start to get pretty dicey for me because I don't know what to do. I'm being attacked, okay? I don't know where to go with my queen, but I know that I'm still not in good shape here. One thing that I always keep in mind is I do not like to move the pawns in front of my king, especially when it's castled like this, because it creates a lot of weaknesses. And that's just something I've learned, not because I'm an expert, but because I've lost a lot of games where someone will sacrifice a bishop, okay? And then you take back with a pawn and then you just open up that part right there. I know that that's not good for me. And so what I do is I back up because I just wanna keep everything on this part really solid. And here is where I could have played even simpler chess, but what I did was I saw that I tried to calculate what my opponent was going to do. I did not react to what is happening right now, but I'm looking one move ahead. And I see that one move ahead is right here, okay? And then if the knight goes here, this is checkmate, okay? So a couple of options that I thought about were I thought about moving my rook over so I can move out of the way, but I still didn't think that was a very good plan. And since my queen was protected by this bishop, I thought, ha ha, even if I do something drastic like move this pawn, I at least could trade off. And I would have a weakness right here on the G file, but I thought I could survive. Like all I wanted at this point was survival. So I moved, which is a blunder. I see that now. What the computer wanted me to do was move my queen first here. And then even if they move their knight, I could put my queen right here and protect. I didn't see that. I didn't think of the most simple term. I looked for one move that would get me what I needed, okay? And luckily my opponent really goofed because my opponent completely gave away their queen, okay? Maybe they saw what was gonna happen next, but I took the queen and then I thought, ha ha, they're gonna resign. They did not. Right here, this is another really dangerous position for me because the rook is now looking at my queen and wherever the knight moves, whether it's here or here or here is check. Now the most dangerous obviously is check right here because I'm in check, I'd have to move here, and then I lose my queen in another check, right? So I started to panic thinking, do I just sacrifice my queen? My first thought was, do I just sacrifice my queen and then try to survive after that because maybe I can? But then an even simpler idea occurred to me. I forgot that the knight can't move yet at all. So what I did was I attacked the knight because the knight can't move out of the way, put me in check. It's gonna be lost either way because even if the queen, the king moves out of the way, I take this piece and that's exactly what I did. So they moved to protect it. I'm taking this. This is automatic for me. So take, they take, put me in check. I'm okay with trading a queen for a rook at this point because I'm going up so much material. Not only that, what my opponent didn't think of was when I put the king in check, this is also pretty much wide open. So take, take, take, and then my opponent resigned after this move. The biggest thing that I want you to take from this game is not that I won it, but that if you play simple chess, look at all of your pieces and try to develop, you'll get in a position where you at least have a fighting chance at victory. So look one move ahead, watch your opponent's pieces, and you might have a chance at winning even games that you think you have no shot at winning. Thanks for watching.