The Opening, Middle Game and End Game

You are sitting on the couch of your living room, watching Television and cricket is on your mind. You select a popular sports channel to watch. Now, you are disappointed. They are not airing cricket, instead a game with 64 squares and 32 pieces. You immediately change the channel. I know, most of the non-chess players do that. As they find chess boring compared to cricket or baseball or any other sport. You might think that Chess is not a spectator sport. Once you play chess and have a basic understanding about the game, it is very much enjoyable to watch a chess game, live. Chess, a sport? That’s something debate-able.

Chess is a game which traces its origin to ancient India as Chaturanga. Then it found its way to Persian empires and spread to the Muslim world and became Shatranj. It spread to the greeks as Zatrikion, to the Portuguese as Xadrez and to rest of the Europe as Chess. Well, that’s enough history of the game to get you started.

Considering you know all the rules of this game, I am going to elaborate it. Check if you know En passant

I am pretty sure that if you are not a chess player, you are not aware of the following. No one told you, yet.

The game of Chess can be broadly divided into 3 stages. Sounds crazy, isn’t it? Read on.

1) The Opening - First 10-15 moves.

2) Middle Game - The later part of the game.

3) End Game - This is the part when most of your pieces are out of the board and considered to be the toughest phase of the game.

The Opening is basically a set of predetermined moves that you and your opponent are going to play. Now you surely would think, “Why in the world should my opponent play moves pertaining to a certain opening?”

Trust me, he will and he should play those moves. If he ignores, he will run into all sorts of positional disadvantages and if you are strong enough to exploit them, you will end up winning the game easily!

So that’s a basic idea about chess openings.

The Queen's pawn Opening

According to the America’s Foundation for Chess, there are 169,518,829,100,544,000,000,000,000,000 ways to play the first 10 moves of a game of Chess. Isn’t that amazing?

Constructing on the idea of opening, the middle game is where all the action takes place. There will be a point where your theory can’t help you anymore. It tests the ingenuity of a player.

The Complicated "Middlegame"

Play the opening like a book, the middle game like a magician, and the endgame like a machine.

as told by Rudolf Spielmann, a great chess player, this emphasizes the unyielding and tricky nature of the endgame. You got to play it strong, keep it simple or else you are bound to lose.

The End game

If you want to improve your Chess game, you need to solve end game puzzles. Go and ask a grand master and he will suggest the same. As on the whole, you are going to end up playing ‘The End Game’, you must be able to evaluate an end game position as good/bad for you, a level which can be attained by solving endgame puzzles.

You need not be a grand master, an International master or even a rated chess player to enjoy the sport. It improves your memory power, can make math students better at calculations and what not. Chess is a beautiful game which has not yet gained the much needed popularity among people. Go on, it is waiting for you to teach it to your sons and daughters. Who knows, they maybe the next Magnus or Vishy!