Opening Principles

Playing the opening very well is essential to success at the chessboard and this course aims to help you not only to play the opening better yourself by following the principles that we will outline in this course but also by knowing these principles we can recognize when our opponent plays the opening weakly and we can punish this. The course is going to be split up in certain core topics when it comes to opening principles and we going to start after a brief introduction to discuss the importance of controlling the center, afterwards we will focus for the next few lessons on the importance of development and the major goals that you wish when completing your development. Finally, we will close off the topic with a discussion on king safety, because at the end of the day without king safety all the other achievements that you make on the chessboard do not count for much. We really hope that you will join this course if you feel that your opening play is perhaps not so strong, but you also don’t want to get bulk down in opening theory. Many chess players think that they need to study a lot of opening theory in order to play the opening well. But in reality, the most important thing at the club level is that you know the opening principles that can help you across all the different types of opening positions because these are universal guiding principles. If you like the sound of this then we hope to see you in this course. This course is intended for players with a FIDE rating of 1000-1200 ELO, but also improvers and intermediate players can benefit from this course. A complete set of PGNs of everything covered in this course can be downloaded and will help you to analyze it at your own pace and convenience.