This board plays the full standard rules: castling, en passant, promotion to any piece, and draws by stalemate, threefold repetition, the fifty-move rule and dead material. You play White and move first. The computer looks a fixed distance ahead and always plays out the captures that follow a move, so it rarely falls for a piece left hanging in plain sight. What beats it, on every level, is a plan.
The first ten moves
The opening has one job: get your pieces off the back row and onto squares where they do something, without losing anything on the way.
- Take the centre with a pawn or two. The four middle squares (d4, e4, d5 and e5) touch the most of the board. Opening with e4 or d4 frees a bishop and the queen at once.
- Knights before bishops. A knight on f3 or c6 covers the centre and is hard to chase away. Knights on the edge reach half as many squares, which is where the saying about a knight on the rim comes from.
- Castle early. Castling tucks your king behind its pawns and brings a rook toward the middle in one move. Most games are lost by a king left in the centre while the files open up around it.
- Move each piece once. Moving the same piece three times in the opening hands the computer free development. Bring a new piece out with almost every move.
- Keep the queen home for now. An early queen gets chased by pawns and minor pieces, and each of those chasing moves develops the computer for free.
Look for checks, captures and threats
Before every move, ask two questions. What does the computer's last move attack? And what would each of my checks and captures do? Most blunders come from skipping the first question, and most missed wins from skipping the second.
The tactics that decide games are short:
- Forks. One piece attacks two at once. Knights are the best at it, because the two targets usually can't defend each other. A knight landing on a square that hits the king and the queen wins the queen.
- Pins. A bishop, rook or queen attacks a piece that can't move without exposing something bigger behind it, often the king. A pinned piece is a poor defender, so pile up on it.
- Skewers. Like a pin turned round: the bigger piece is in front, it has to move, and the one behind it falls.
- Undefended pieces. Count the attackers and defenders on a piece before you trade on its square. If you have more attackers, the capture usually wins material.
Trading and the middle of the game
Count material in pawns: a knight or bishop is worth about three, a rook five and the queen nine. The captured-pieces rows above and below the board keep this count for you, with the side that is ahead marked by a plus.
When you are ahead, trade pieces, not pawns. Every swap makes your extra material count for more, and a simple endgame is easier to win than a crowded middlegame. When you are behind, keep pieces on the board and look for complications.
Rooks want open files, columns with no pawns on them. Doubling your rooks on an open file, or landing one on the computer's second row, often wins a pawn or traps the king.
Finishing the game
A big material lead still has to be turned into checkmate. With a king and queen against a lone king, use the queen to shrink the box the king can move in, a knight's move away from it, then bring your own king up to help. Watch out for stalemate: if the computer's king has no square to go to and isn't in check, the game is a draw, so always leave it one square until the final blow. A king and rook mate the same way, more slowly.
Pawns become queens. In an endgame with few pieces, a passed pawn, one with no enemy pawns in front of it or beside it, is often worth more than a piece. Push it, and walk your king up beside it.
Moving through the levels
Easy looks one move ahead and sometimes gives away a piece, so it is the place to practise the opening and your first checkmates. Medium looks two moves ahead and punishes a piece left unprotected. Hard searches several moves deep, and the way to beat it is a sound position: a castled king, developed pieces and no loose pawns. Take back is there for learning, so use it to replay a position where you missed something and find the better move.
