The Library
Chess guides, written properly
Twenty-one openings from both sides, and seven complete guides to the rest of the game. No fluff, no filler — the plans, the structures and the mistakes that actually decide games.
Most chess content online is either a wall of variations nobody remembers or a list of principles too vague to use. These guides are written the way a coach explains an opening across a board: what the first moves are for, the handful of plans that recur in every game, the pawn structure that decides which squares exist, and the specific mistakes that lose. Every opening is covered twice — once for the player using it and once for the player facing it — because knowing how to play the French and knowing how to beat it are different skills that happen to share a name.
Everything here is free and everything here is playable. Each guide ends on a live board where you can try the structure against a real engine and have every move rated afterwards, which is the part that actually turns reading into rating points.
Complete guides
Seven guides covering everything the Academy teaches, each one the full write-up rather than a single drill.
- How Every Chess Piece Moves — Every piece, every rule, every square it can reach — the complete beginner's guide.
- The Chess Rules Most Players Get Wrong — Castling, en passant, promotion, stalemate and the draw rules — explained properly.
- Checkmate Patterns Every Player Should Know — Back-rank, smothered, Anastasia's, the Arabian and the rest — the shapes that end games.
- Chess Tactics: Forks, Pins, Skewers and Discovered Attacks — The five tactical motifs that decide most club games, with the patterns behind them.
- Chess Endgames: What You Actually Need to Know — Opposition, king and pawn, the Lucena and the Philidor — the endgames that occur.
- Chess Strategy: Structure, Squares and Long-Term Plans — Weak squares, outposts, the bishop pair, pawn majorities and how to make a plan.
- Chess Opening Principles That Actually Matter — Control the centre, develop, castle — and the reasons behind each, with the exceptions.
Opening guides
Twenty-one openings, each written twice — once for the player using it and once for the player facing it, because those are genuinely different problems.
Chess variants
Twenty variants, each with a complete guide — the rules, the plans, the mistakes, and what each one teaches you about standard chess. Every one is playable free in the browser, and almost nobody else has written about most of them properly.
- Crazyhouse — Captured pieces switch sides and can be dropped back on the board.
- Chess960 (Fischer Random) — The back rank is shuffled — 960 possible starting positions, no opening theory.
- King of the Hill — Get your king to one of the four central squares and you win instantly.
- Three-Check Chess — Check your opponent three times and you win — checkmate optional.
- Horde Chess — White has 36 pawns and no other pieces. Black has a normal army.
- Racing Kings — Both kings race for the eighth rank. No checks allowed, ever.
- Antichess (Losing Chess) — Capturing is compulsory and losing all your pieces wins the game.
- Really Bad Chess — Randomised armies — you might get three queens, your opponent might get five knights.
- No-Castling Chess — Everything is standard except castling is illegal. Proposed by Vladimir Kramnik.
- Pawn Battle — Pawns and kings only. First to promote wins.
- Upside-Down Chess — The pieces and pawns swap ranks — pawns on the back, pieces in front.
- Knight Odds — White plays without a knight — the classic teaching handicap.
- Rook Odds — White plays without a rook — a serious handicap for a serious gap.
- Queen Odds — White plays without the queen — the largest classical handicap.
- Endgame Arena — Start straight in an endgame — no opening, no middlegame.
- Mirror Random — A randomised back rank, identical for both sides.
- Double Random — Both back ranks randomised independently — the armies do not match.
- Peasants' Revolt — One side has a king and eight pawns; the other has a king, four knights and a pawn.
- Light Brigade — One side gets a queen and pawns; the other gets minor pieces and pawns.
- Standard Chess — The original — and still the deepest game on the board.
Coaching & scholastic chess
For teachers, coaches and parents — the practical side of chess that nobody writes guides about.
- How to Start a Chess Club at Your School — Most school chess clubs die in the third week. Not from lack of interest — from lack of structure. Here is the version that survives.
- What Age Should a Child Start Chess? — The short answer is around five or six for the rules and seven or eight for real games. The longer answer is that age matters much less than how you introduce it.
- Chess Ratings Explained — A Guide for Parents — Your child came home with a number and you have no idea whether it is good. Here is what it means, without the jargon.
- How to Become a Chess Coach — You do not need a title. You need to be roughly 400 points stronger than your students, organised, and able to explain one idea at a time.
- How to Teach a Child Chess — The First Ten Lessons — Do not teach all the pieces at once. Here is the sequence that works, one lesson at a time.
- How to Run a Scholastic Chess Tournament — A five-round Swiss for forty children takes about four hours and needs one thing you probably do not have yet: a plan for what happens when someone cries.
- Using Chess Variants to Teach — A Coach's Guide — Variants are not a break from real chess. Used deliberately, each one isolates a single skill and drills it harder than any exercise.
- Is Chess Good for Kids? An Honest Look — Chess is genuinely good for children, and most of the reasons given for it are overstated. Here is a straight account.
- Is My Child Ready for Their First Chess Tournament? — The question is almost never about strength. A child rated nothing at all can have a wonderful first tournament, and a strong one can have a miserable afternoon. What decides it is whether they can handle a long game, a loss, and a room full of silence.
- How Does My Child Get an Official Chess Rating? — A rating is not a score or a grade. It is a prediction: this number says how likely you are to beat someone with a different number. Understanding that one sentence prevents most of the misery parents feel about ratings.
- How to Choose a Chess Coach for Your Child — The strongest player available is usually not the right coach, and a coach's own rating tells you almost nothing about whether your child will improve. What matters is whether they can find the one thing your child is doing wrong and make them want to fix it.
- How Much Should My Child Practise Chess? — Fifteen minutes a day beats two hours on Sunday, and it is not close. Chess improvement is pattern recognition, and patterns need repeated exposure over time rather than one long session your child ends up dreading.
- What Is a Quad Chess Tournament? — A quad is four players in a group, each playing the other three. Three games, everyone plays everyone, nobody is eliminated and nobody sits out. For a first rated experience it is kinder than a Swiss and easier for a coach to run.
- Chess Club or Private Coach — Which Does Your Child Need? — Most parents buy these in the wrong order. One-to-one coaching is the most expensive option and, for a beginner, usually the least effective — not because coaching does not work, but because what a beginner needs most is games, and a club provides those far more cheaply.
Play any of it right now
197 interactive lessons and a full engine, free in the browser.
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