1Use all your pieces. Do not keep moving your Knight around, just because he can give lots of checks. Use your entire army! One of the biggest rookie mistakes is to only using a few of your pieces. When that happens, the rest just end up lagging behind and make for easy captures for your opponent. So keep the board lively, keep your opponent on his toes.In your opening, place a few pawns one or two spaces forward and then start moving the other pieces. This allows more pieces on the first row to pass through and enter the playing field easily, giving you more offensive power.2Control the center. Since so many pieces can move about every which way, controlling the center is considered more beneficial than controlling the sides. When you dominate the center, your pieces have more mobility than they had at the edge or the corner. As an example, the knight only has two options to move from a corner, but he has eight options to move from a central square! Dominate the center as quickly as you can.It's for this reason that many people have their middle pawns start off the game. Just make sure you don't open up your king for an early checkmate by a well-placed bishop or a queen!3Don't give your pieces away needlessly. This is pretty obvious, yet many players hang their pieces, even grandmasters as well! If you must give them away, have them be in a trade. Never just relinquish one mindlessly -- they're all valuable, whether it is a pawn or a queen. There is a point system, if you're curious. The more valuable they are, the more points they're worth:Pawns are worth 1 pointKnights are worth 3 pointsBishops are worth 3 pointsRooks are worth 5 pointsQueens are worth 9 pointsKings are invaluable because if you lose your king, you lose the game.4Protect your king. This is something you should pay special attention to. If you do nothing else -- if you aren't one much for doing the attacking -- you have to protect your king. Get him in the corner by castling, set up a fortress of pieces around him, make sure to give him a square to run, in case your opponent does manage to give you a check. You want to get your opponent fleeing rather than attacking as soon as possible.He can do very little on his own, yet he can hold his own. In the starting and the middle phases of the game, he almost always needs at least one or two pieces to watch out for any checks. However in the end stages of the game, when only a couple of pieces and few pawns are left on the board, the King then becomes a fighting piece and should be centralized.
