Tarafa - Chess for Beginners: Conquer your Friends: The 4-in-1 Collection

Conquer your Friends in Chess

How to Play Chess for Beginners

Table of Contents

Preparation

The Beginner Challenge

The Board and the Players

The Pawn

The Bishop

The Knight

The Rook

The Queen

The King

Check, Checkmate, and Illegal Moves

Special Moves

How to Set up the Board

Basic Strategy and Objectives

The Visual Game

Chapter 1: How to play Chess for (Absolute) Beginners

My name is Maxen R. Tarafa, and Im a Skill Artist. If youre looking to learn a board game where you can tune out, roll some dice, and hope youre lucky enough to win, youve come to wrong place. But if youre looking for an ancient game of wits, war, and intellect, hop on your saddle partner. Im going to show you how you can play Chess at a beginner level in an alarmingly short amount of time.

Of course, a lot of books promise to teach the basics of Chess, but rarely deliver on results, so what makes this one different?

If youve read other Chess books for beginners, you may find a lot of interesting informationthat you couldnt possibly learn from.

Many Chess books for beginners use a lot of complex terminology and strange symbols resembling the periodic table, such as QxB6 and NaH!?.

If the symbols above look like a foreign language, youve come to the right place. You see, the problem with most books is they say theyre for beginners, but theyre actually NOT. Theyre written by Chess masters or internet marketers who dont realize beginners dont know how to read complicated Chess notation or terminology, and in my opinion, dont need to know.

My guess is you want to learn how to play Chess or refresh your knowledge on the basics, and you want to do it quickly and easily. Excellent.

While Ill take you through a more involved approach to learning Chess, I can promise that if you read this book and practice the recommended exercises, you will learn and (more importantly) remember the basics of Chess when you sit down to play, and do it faster than ever before.

Instead of dumping information on you, I want to lead you through a kind of guided meditation. To help you remember and understand, Im going to ask you to stop and visualize, imagine, touch, move, and feel the Chess pieces and the moves at hand.

But, who am I? And why do I want to teach you how to play Chess so bad?

I grew up playing Chess against my brothers, cousins, and friends. In college, I started playing against my roommates, but I didnt win nearly as often as I would have liked. After I graduated from college, I wanted to get better at Chess, and found every bit of information I could find, and more than doubled my online rating from about 600 to 1300 in three months.

It wasnt until a while later when it came time to teach my nine-year-old brother Chess that I realized there were only a few easy principles that if the post-beginner just knew what they were and remembered them while playing, it would improve their game immensely. I taught him those principles and within a week he was beating 16 and 17-year-olds.

Later, after coaching a Chess club and continuing to improve my Chess game, I ended up writing a highly successful book called Chess: Conquer your Friends with 8 Easy Principles where I divulged the high impact principles I had taught to my younger brother and others.

Now, I want to apply the same philosophy to learning Chess for beginners: a focus on remembering and using the information fast , and not just reading it.

Ive coached kids as young as 5 and adults as old as their thirties. Ive taught everything from how to move a Pawn to how to avoid a Zugzwang. It doesnt matter how old you are or how little experience you have, if you promise to read this book carefully and practice the exercises, I promise youll be confident at playing Chess at a beginner level in as little as a few hours.

After reading this book, youll be well on your way to your own Chess empire, but remember with great power comes great responsibility.

I trust that youll use it wisely.

Sincerely,

Maxen R. Tarafa

Preparation

If you own a Chess board, I highly suggest you take your Chess board out of the closet, dust it off, and take the pieces out.

In the first section, youre going to learn how to set up the board, the name of each piece, and how they move. Although I use copious images to help you along, people tend to learn best when they engage multiple senses. If you have a board, please feel free to touch, taste, smell, envision, hear, and even taste (if you feel so inclined) the piece were covering.

If you dont have a Chess board and youre serious about learning Chess, you may want to consider buying one. You can often get a decent plastic one for less than $10 at any Wal-Mart, toy store, or online at Amazon. Although $10 or less is the cheapest, I recommend buying a wooden board in the $10 to $20 range because it will last longer, and youll get more bang for your buck.

You can find an inexpensive wooden board I recommend here.