How to learn chess from scratch

The order here matters more than the content: almost every self-taught adult learns the right things in the wrong sequence.

Material for each step: the rules, checkmates, tactics, the endgame, openings catalogue.

You do not need to spend your first evening looking for a course. Three things are enough, and they are all here:

• Set the board up and make sure everything is in the right place. A beginner's commonest mistake happens before the first move - setting up the chessboard.
• Read the rules right through, the rare moves included. Castling, en passant, pawn promotion and stalemate - rules of chess.
• Play your first game the same day. Reading about chess without playing is useless: the skill is only built at the board.

After that, follow the plan below. It is designed for somebody starting from scratch who can give chess a few hours a week.

A month is a realistic time to stop hanging pieces and start playing with a purpose. The split by week is approximate: if a stage is hard going, linger over it - the order matters more than the speed.

What the plan deliberately leaves out is memorising opening lines. At this stage they do not work: your opponent will leave theory on move three and what you learned turns out to be useless. Instead there is tactics, which decides games up to a confident intermediate level.

Positions are convenient to work through on the online board: it has ready teaching positions - mate with a rook, mate with a queen, opposition of the kings and the rule of the square.

There are tens of thousands of opening lines, and there is no sense in a beginner learning them: an opponent at beginner level will leave theory on move three anyway. Three rules do the work.

• Take the centre with pawns. Moving a central pawn two squares is almost always a good start.
• Develop the minor pieces. Knights and bishops before the queen and rooks. The rule “knights before bishops” is sensible too, though not absolute.
• Castle early. The king goes into the corner and the rook comes into play. Delayed castling is the cause of an enormous share of amateur losses.

And three anti-rules: do not move one piece many times in a row, do not bring the queen out at the start of the game, and do not chase pawns while forgetting about development. This set will last you five years of amateur play.

Honest benchmarks for an adult working at it without fanaticism - roughly three to four hours a week, playing included:

A caveat: the timings vary enormously. Some people see tactics after a month, others need a year - and that is fine, as long as the person keeps playing rather than giving up at the first plateau.

• Learning openings first. The commonest mistake. Opening theory is useless while pieces are being hung in the middlegame.
• Playing only blitz. Fast play trains speed but not calculation. Progress comes from a long game where there is time to think - about blitz.
• Not going through your own games. A hundred games with no post-mortem teach you less than ten that you went through.
• Watching videos instead of solving puzzles. Watching creates a feeling of progress, but only solving things yourself builds the skill.
• Being shy about playing in person. An adult imagines that everyone at the club is stronger and will laugh at them. In practice any club is glad to see a beginner - that is a future regular.
• Giving up after a run of losses. The first tournaments almost always end in a bad result. That is not a signal that you cannot do it; it is a normal start.

Online gives you volume: hundreds of games, puzzles, automatic analysis and an opponent at any hour. Playing in person gives you what online does not give at all.

• A different kind of nerves. There is a live human opposite you at the board, and that changes the quality of your decisions - it takes getting used to separately.
• Working the clock with your hands. A skill online does not give you at all.
• Seeing the whole board. On a screen the picture is flat; at a board the eye works differently - many people start blundering for the first time exactly when they move offline.
• Going through the game straight afterwards. Going through it together with your opponent is the best thing in over-the-board chess, and online it is impossible.

The combination that works: online for volume and puzzles, tournaments in person every month or two for real progress - where to play in person.

At the start, no. The rules, the basic checkmates and the first puzzles are comfortably mastered alone, and there is no sense in paying a specialist for that.

A coach is worth it when one of three things happens:

• Progress has stalled. You play a lot and the results do not improve - which means the mistake is systemic, and it is spotted faster from outside.
• It is unclear what to do next. A coach saves you months simply by setting the priorities.
• You need discipline. A paid lesson once a week works better than any plan.

How to choose one and what to ask at the first lesson is in how to choose a coach.

Sooner than you think. The typical adult mistake is preparing up to a “respectable level” that never arrives, because the level grows at tournaments in the first place.

The sufficient minimum: you know the rules confidently, you can mate with a queen and you understand what the clock is for. That is all. Choose an amateur evening at a short time control - half the room there is in the same situation.

And be ready to lose most of your games at the first two or three tournaments. It is not about you personally, it is simply the distance of learning - a tournament for beginners, etiquette at the board.