Topic 3 (Simple enough) - The opening basics
Ok, now I’ll discuss the basics of how to play the opening in Kung Fu Chess.
(Extremely important stuff emphasized like this:
extremely important stuff)
First things first, my recommendation is to
never play pawns in the V shape like this:
The reason for avoiding this formation is that it gives your opponent a free square on your side of the board to put his knight, which is very bad for you:
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BAD!!! |
Additionally, V shaped pawns can trap your own bishop.
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BAD!!! |
The first thing to try to do in the opening is to take control of the center, which means having your pawns attack these squares:
So you have 4 possible pawn plays that will attack one of these 2 squares:
You must play one of those 4 pawn moves or your opening is weak. (Note: Playing more than one is fine, but if you play two side by side, you MUST be faster than your opponent or you could lose one because it cannot be defended two pawns. Also, avoid playing alternate pawns, as this leads to the dreadful V shape.)
The next thing you want to try to do is to place your knights on squares where they give the opponent a hard time and also cannot be attacked.
Placing knights on strategically good squares is the most important thing to do in the opening.
So what does that mean exactly? Well, I’ll walk you through white’s opening here and you’ll see:
So, our opponent was incredibly insanely fast and he finished his entire opening before we even moved a piece! But fear not, his opening sucked! He’s got Vs galore, and he trapped in his own light-squared bishop. Now, the first thing to do in the opening, as I said before, is to attack the center with one of those 4 pawn moves. We don’t want to play a pawn where it will be attacked by two opposing pawns, so f4 seems a logical choice. (d4 would be just as good).
Step 2: place your knights on squares where they give the opponent a hard time and also cannot be attacked.
Well, if they can’t be attacked, and also need to attack the opponent’s back line, then that limits us to these squares:
(yes, the two on the right are attacked by the black queen, but your opponent won’t be trading queen for knight, so that’s no problem)
So, let’s put a knight on the middle yellow square, and on the far right yellow square (any two would be fine really) We’ll need to play a pawn to b4 to stop the opponent from attacking the middle yellow square with his c pawn, and we’ll play the knight to f3, so it can move to the yellow square on it’s next move:
Ok, glancing at the board we see both our pawns are undefended, so we’ll play a3 and g3 to defend them from attack from black’s bishop:
Now we can safely play the knight to the middle yellow square with no problem. Next, we need to position the other knight so it can move to the far right yellow square, so we play a pawn to d3, and the knight to d2:
So in another two moves, we’ll have our knights onto their squares:
And now the knights are on good squares.
Now we come to step 3:
position the bishops so they attack as many squares as they can. So you want your bishops to be placed on long open diagonals. In this opening, we have two possibilities for the dark-square bishop, b2 or e3, and the light squared bishop should move to g2 (I’ll just pick b2 for the dark squared bishop, e3 would be fine too):
The arrows show the diagonals that the bishops can move along. As you can see, the light squared bishop isn’t very useful yet, but that’s fine, since black’s bishops would both have even shorter arrows if I drew them in.
The only thing left to do now is to castle and play the queen to d2 so the rooks are connected:
Notice how black doesn’t have any safe moves he can make to attack. His knights are blocked from moving to c4 or e4 by the pawn on d3, and white can play h3 if black tries to play his knight to g4. Black is reduced to a sitting duck, even though he played all his opening moves before white started.
From here, white has multiple options for the attack. He can play his bishop to f3, threatening a combination on the right side with the knight and bishop (though currently it is defended). He can also play pawns to c4 or e4, or even g4 after h3, depending on what he feels like. The point is that white has total control of the game, simply because he read this guide!
Attack possibilities for both sides: (black hasn’t got any!)
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Not a safe combination yet,
but if that black knight moves... |
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