Chess Opening Principles - How to Start a Chess Game

This guide covers the core principles that let you come out of the opening in good shape, with everything you need to play a strong middlegame. If you have not learned the rules yet, start with our guide on how to play chess before working through the principles below.

Once you have these principles down, you will be ready to explore specific openings step by step in our complete guide to chess openings. We will also look at how five-time World Champion Magnus Carlsen approaches the opening, and how to go about choosing your own opening repertoire once you understand the ideas behind it.

Let's get started.

How to Start a Chess Game the Right Way

So, how do you start a chess game well? Any player can get through the opening in good shape by following four principles that are clear and easy to apply. Our own course material was designed by Tigran Gharamyan, the grandmaster who won the French championship in 2018.

1. Control the center with your pieces and your pawns. The four central squares give any piece stationed there more influence over the board, and a pawn on d4 or e4 restricts what your opponent's pieces can do. Fighting for these squares from move one is the foundation every other opening idea builds on.

2. Develop your minor pieces onto active squares. A knight or bishop posted near the center controls far more squares than the same piece stuck on the rim of the board.

3. Get your king to safety by castling. The pawns sitting in front of your castled king form its shelter, and you should only move them when you truly have to.

4. Win the development race by not bringing your queen out too early and not moving the same piece twice without a good reason.

Master these four ideas and you already know how to start a chess game better than most club players do.

How Much Chess Opening Theory Do You Really Need?

The stereotype of the chess player who has memorized opening variations dozens of moves deep only really applies at the very top of the game.

The reasoning behind it makes sense at that level. Catching an opponent off guard in the opening can be enough to decide the game. Fail to get anything out of the opening against equally prepared opposition, and a draw is the likely outcome. That is why opening preparation takes up so much space in the work of top players.

To find new ideas, they comb through databases holding millions of games, and some of them even have teams dedicated to digging up novelties for them.

None of that applies to your own games. At club level, the four principles above will serve you far better than any memorized line.

What Magnus Carlsen Can Teach You About the Opening

How does Magnus Carlsen like to start a chess game?

On this point, Carlsen changed the way people think about chess. He puts almost no weight on the opening itself, betting instead on his ability to outplay his opponent in the middlegame and the endgame.

It is not unusual to see him come out of the opening with a position that is technically worse, and still grind out the win afterward.

Carlsen put the understanding of chess back where it belongs, ahead of memorized theory, and plenty of players from the younger generation now follow his lead. It's a refreshing shift, and one worth learning from.

Choosing the Right Chess Openings for You

How do you choose which openings to learn, out of the dozens available? That's a real question, and there is no single answer that fits everyone. Our guide to the main chess openings walks through the biggest ones and what each one is trying to achieve. You will see that openings like the French Defense, the Sicilian Defense, the Scandinavian Defense, and the Caro-Kann Defense all pursue the same underlying goals. They just get there in different ways.

Those four are all answers to 1.e4 as Black. If you would rather start the game with White, our guides to the Italian Game and the Ruy Lopez show the same principles at work move by move.

The best approach is to pick openings whose ideas make sense to you, based on the principles you just learned, rather than memorizing lines you don't understand. Once you have played an opening a few times and reviewed what happened, you will have a much better feel for whether it suits your style.

When you are ready to keep learning, our guide on how to finish a game with a checkmate is a natural next step.

Your Move

That's our rundown of the chess opening principles that matter most. Keep them in mind, and you will start every game with a plan instead of a guess.

• New to the game? Start with our complete guide on how to play chess
• Explore the main chess openings once you are ready to specialize
• Learn how to seal the win in our guide to checkmate