Ultimate Chess Set

The Ultimate Chess Set

Learn How To Play Chess The Easy Way
by Joseph Nguyen

Chess is a fascinating game that has survived the ages. It has survived countless wars and historical events such as Independence Day and the release date of Independence Day on DVD. And it will continue to do so until some super computer with a thousand processing cores whips up the ultimate, single answer to chess (which is inevitably a draw, sorry to spoil the climax).

But there are many tournaments being played all over the world, and many of them have humans playing in them. In fact, over 99% of chess players are actually human. Did you know that? And the rest are silicon chip-based machines or laboratory tested animals - not that I endorse this.

So chess really is a game made by humans for humans. We just decided to create machines so that we didn't have think as much, although there are rules that don't allow you bring your laptop or computer into the playing hall.

The first steps to learning something new are usually difficult. And you're probably thinking this is the same with chess. Well, you couldn't be more wrong - how can a game consisting of only 32 pieces be hard to learn? It's like saying tic-tac-toe consisting of 64 squares is difficult to play (assuming 3 in a row still wins).

Well, it's a lot easier than it makes out to be. For starters, there ARE 32 pieces on an 8x8 board (hence 64 squares, if you forgot how to multiply) and you control 16 of these. There are 6 different pieces, and in order of increasing strength, they are: pawn, king, knight, bishop, rook and queen.

You might be thinking that I've made a mistake by putting king as the 2nd weakest piece. But the whole purpose of chess is to checkmate the enemy king. So, if the king wasn't weak, then chess WOULD be hard to play. Imagine having to take down an army only to have to take down another army - this time, a ONE-MAN army.

So that's why the king is (mainly) defended throughout a game of chess.

All the other pieces help defend the king and can also create threats against the enemy king. You could also just defend the king and hope that your opponent makes a mistake and then win that way but, what if you're the first one to make the mistake? Then it's not such a big world after all.

Joseph Nguyen is a chess enthusiast who would be more than delighted to show you how to play chess - for free. Visit his site to find out more.

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