Getting Good at Chess: What Beginners Get Wrong

Chess has been having a moment. The Queen's Gambit, the rise of streaming, Magnus Carlsen playing speed chess online — suddenly everyone's interested again.

And most beginners are learning it wrong.

The beginner trap: memorising openings

The first thing most new players do is look up "best chess openings for beginners" and start memorising move sequences. The Italian Game. The London System. The Sicilian Defence.

This is a waste of time until you're at least a 1200-rated player.

Openings only matter when your opponent plays the expected responses. At beginner level, nobody plays the expected responses. They make surprising, bad moves that your memorised sequence doesn't account for. You're left three moves in with a broken line and no idea what to do.

What to do instead: learn three principles and apply them every game:

1. Control the centre — occupy or attack the four central squares (e4, d4, e5, d5) in the first few moves
2. Develop your pieces — get knights and bishops off the back rank and into the game before moving the same piece twice
3. Castle early — get your king to safety behind pawns, then start your attack

Play every game with these three goals and you'll beat most beginners without memorising a single opening.

The only tactic that matters at beginner level

Chess tactics are short sequences of moves that win material or deliver checkmate. There are many: pins, forks, skewers, discovered attacks, zwischenzugs.

At beginner level, one dominates: the fork.

A fork is when one piece attacks two enemy pieces simultaneously. The classic beginner fork is the knight fork — a knight moves to a square attacking the king and a rook (or queen). Your opponent must move their king; you take the rook for free.

Spend your first two months finding forks. Practise spotting them in puzzles before you look for anything else. You'll improve faster than players who study everything.

Chess.com and Lichess.org both have puzzle modes. Do 20 puzzles a day. Pattern recognition builds faster than any other method.

Why you should lose on purpose

The most important thing a beginner can do is play many, many games. Not one or two a week — multiple games a day, at faster time controls (10 minutes per player, or faster).

Most beginners resist losing. They play slowly, think too long, and play infrequently to avoid the discomfort.

This is exactly wrong. Losing quickly gives you more games, which gives you more pattern exposure. You don't learn chess from the games you win. You learn it from the games you lose.

Play blitz. Lose fast. Notice why. Play again.

What "studying" chess actually means

Once you're past absolute beginner level, study means three things, in this order:

1. Tactics puzzles — 20 minutes a day. Highest-return activity at every level below expert. Even grandmasters do tactics puzzles every day.

2. Reviewing your own games — after each game, look at where you went wrong. Chess.com and Lichess both have free computer analysis showing your mistakes. Don't analyse games you've won. Analyse the ones you lost.

3. Endgames — most players ignore endgames until they're intermediate. Knowing basic king-and-pawn endgames, the Lucena position, and how to mate with rook and king is worth more than knowing twenty openings.

Opening theory is last. Spend time on it when you're rated above 1200 and not before.

The plateau and how to break it

Every chess player hits a plateau — usually around 800–1000 online. You stop improving despite playing regularly.

The plateau usually means one of two things: you're playing but not studying, or you're studying openings instead of tactics.

Fix: cut your playing time in half and use the other half for tactics puzzles. Hold that ratio for a month. The plateau breaks.

The airgap.life chess course covers everything from reading the board for the first time through to the tactical patterns and endgame fundamentals that take you from beginner to genuinely competitive.