Free chess guides
Learn chess properly — one topic at a time
Long-form guides on the ideas that actually decide games: opening plans, tactical patterns, mating nets, positional structure and how to organise your study time. Free to read, written by the same team behind The Master Study Library.
Free guide · Openings · 18 min read
The Best Chess Openings for Beginners
The best chess openings for beginners, explained by plan rather than memorisation: Italian Game, Scotch, London System, Caro-Kann, Queen's Gambit and the Sicilian — with the ideas behind each first twelve moves.
Read the guideFree guide · Tactics · 17 min read
Chess Tactics — The Eight Patterns That Decide Games
Learn chess tactics properly: forks, pins, skewers, discovered attacks, deflection, decoy, removing the defender and overloading — plus a calculation method that stops you blundering.
Read the guideFree guide · Mating nets · 16 min read
Checkmate Patterns Every Player Must Know
The essential checkmate patterns: back rank, smothered mate, Anastasia's mate, Arabian mate, Boden's mate, the ladder and the h-file battery — how each one is built and how to spot it early.
Read the guideFree guide · Improvement · 19 min read
How to Get Better at Chess
A realistic study plan to get better at chess: how to split your time between tactics, endgames, strategy and openings, how to analyse your own games, and what to do at each rating band.
Read the guideFree guide · Rules · 9 min read
How to Castle in Chess
How to castle in chess, step by step: kingside and queenside castling, the five rules that make castling legal, when you cannot castle, and when castling is actually a mistake.
Read the guideFree guide · Rules · 8 min read
En Passant: The Rule Explained
En passant explained with diagrams: the three conditions that make the capture legal, why the rule exists, how to write it in notation, and the tactics it enables in real games.
Read the guideFree guide · Rules · 10 min read
How to Read Chess Notation
Chess notation explained in full: algebraic notation, piece letters, captures, checks, castling, promotion, annotation symbols and how to read a full game score or PGN file.
Read the guideFree guide · Checkmates · 9 min read
How to Win Chess in 4 Moves
How to win chess in 4 moves with Scholar's Mate, the exact defence that refutes it, the 2-move Fool's Mate, and why early queen attacks stop working as soon as opponents know the answer.
Read the guideFree guide · Training · 10 min read
Chess Puzzles for Beginners
Chess puzzles for beginners: the patterns every puzzle is built from, a solving method that works under pressure, how many to do per day, and the mistakes that make puzzle practice useless.
Read the guideFree guide · Positional chess
Chess Strategy for Beginners
Pawn structure, outposts, good and bad bishops, space, prophylaxis and the accumulation of small advantages.
Read the guide
Go deeper than any article can
The 5-volume Master Study Library covers every topic on this page in 250-page workbooks: 200 annotated master games, move-by-move diagrams and exercises with solutions on a later page. From $39 per volume.
See the library