Simple Chess: Strategy & Tactics

State of the Art: The Zoo

I bought a book of beginner chess tactics.
It had 28 chapters, each a different tactic.
There are dozens of different named checkmating patterns - Anastasia's Mate, Legal's Mate, and many more.

This is "the zoo".
The beginner sees many different species of chess tactic without any unifying theory or taxonomy.

Instead I take a philosophical approach that tries to find the core idea of tactics.
Once a student understands some core idea, he is prepared for all 28 (or 29 or 53 or however many) ways it may appear.

Chess Philosophy: Activity

The only way to win at chess is checkmate.
(setting aside off-board actions like forfeits, resignations, etc).

Checkmate occurs when all squares able to host the enemy king are attacked by my pieces (and he cannot turn away the threat).
So the ablity of my pieces to attack important squares is a strategic priority, at least in the long run.
This is activity.

Being a symmetrical game, the non-activity of my opponents' pieces must also be a priority.
To express in a single goal: I want my pieces to be more active than my opponent's pieces.

Activity also provides a path to checkmate aside from direct attack: freezing the opponent or zugzwang.
If a player has no good moves he must make a bad one.
This means that achieving a position of greater activity can produce a victory by itself.

Chess Philosophy: Material

One important way to make my pieces more active than my opponent's pieces is to have more pieces.
There are two ways this can happen:

1. I promote a pawn, increasing my material and activity
2. I attack an opponent's piece and capture it at the cost of lesser pieces (or for free), reducing his material and activity

If I win material, I must first attack his piece and then capture it.
So why did he not simply move it away?
I am aware of only 4 possibilites:

1. He did not see the danger
2. The piece had nowhere safe to move and was trapped
3. Multiple pieces were attacked
4. Pieces were lined up along an attack

These simple categories cover a wide range of "tactics" taught to the beginner, such as removing the defender, forks, skewers, pins, xray, and so forth.

Conclusion: Simple Chess

Rather than a dazzling field of tactics and strategems, I see only a small handful.

1. Checkmate
2. Zugzwang
3. Promotion
4. Donation
5. Trapped Piece
6. Multi-Attack
7. Line Attack

A sacrifice of material may be needed to make any of these work.
Beware the opponent may offer material (even via some complicated tactic) as his own sacrifice to execute his own tactic.

As the student improves, it becomes a matter of instinct to realize when pieces are attacked and weakly defended.
He simply sees that a piece is hanging.
He stops making simple and obvious blunders.
Over time he finds increasingly complex checkmates and tactics fall into his personal category of "simple and obvious blunders".

Ultimately the student has 3 paths to victory:

1. Blunders
2. Promotion
3. Zugzwang

And a single strategy: greater Activity.

This is how I make chess simple enough that even I can understand it.