Chess: What are the First Six Pieces to Open With

A good rule of thumb (at least until you gain more experience and learn some openings) is:

When opening, rhythm is important.

Your tempo should be pawn-piece-pawn-piece . . .

This will ensure a nice even distribution of your resources throughout the board.

Chess: To Sacrifice or Not to Sacrifice?

First let's define "what is a sacrifice". A sacrifice is a move giving up a piece in the hopes of gaining tactical or positional compensation in other forms. A sacrifice could also be a deliberate exchange of a chess piece of higher value for an opponent's piece of lower value.

Any chess piece except the king can be sacrificed. Because players usually try to hold onto their own pieces, offering a sacrifice can come as an unpleasant surprise to one's opponent, putting him off balance and causing much precious time to be wasted trying to calculate whether the sacrifice is sound or not and whether to accept it.

While players of any level should take advantage of this strategy, beginners should use extreme caution since it can throw a game to your opponent's advantage very easily.

In the opening, never sacrifice a piece without a very good reason. Reasons can include: 

1. Gaining control of the center
2. Advancing in development
3. Build up a strong attack
4. Prevent your opponent from castling
5. Etc . . .

Here you can see that white intends to sacrifices his bishop by taking white's king rook pawn and putting black in check. White hopes that when and if, the black king takes the bishop it will expose the black king to immediate further attacks. Once black takes the bishop, white can move in for an attack with the knight and the queen.

Chess: Which Pawn to Move First?

One of the biggest mistakes a new player can make is to start moving the Rook pawns. Yet, more times than not, a new player seems to be drawn into moving those pawns to get the Rooks out.

Don't Do It!

Instead you should move either the King or Queen pawns first. These will give you control of the center.

Chess: Doubled Pawns

"Doubled Pawns" occur when one pawn winds up one in front of another.

Usually, doubled pawns happen after a capture and only a pawn can recapture. You should usually try to re-capture with a piece in order to avoid doubling your pawns.

Generally, you should not be in rush to attack such weaknesses since doubled pawns are a "structural" weaknesses which will usually last for most of game. If you're patient, you can attack the weak pawns once all your pieces are developed.

Doubling your opponent's pawns also increases your chances of gaining a passed pawn.


As you can see below, black has doubled queen's pawns.  

Chess: Controlling the Center

One of the most important things that you should learn early on, is that controlling the center is critical to winning games. In the example below, you can see that White controls the four center squares. An experienced player would say that White has the upper hand so far.

You should try to dominate the center early in your opening.

By the way,...don't ever develop your rook pawns and knights as black has done.

Chess: The Two Move Check-Mate

All Right, I'll start this off by saying that as white you should never play this, nor should it ever come up in a game, but, just in case you're black and someone does, here it is:

HTPC: Why I chose to use Powerline devices

I suppose the first thing I should do, is answer the question: "What is a powerline device".

Well, a powerline device allows you to connect at least two computers together so they can communicate with each other by using your home's existing electrical wiring.

Typically you'd have to either run networking cable through your house and drill holes for the connections. You could also use a wireless network to connect your devices, but there can be dead spots, or other home devices such as microwaves can diminish the signal.

A powerline device is plugged into an electrical outlet and then your computer's network cable is plugged into this device. You do the same with a second device with a computer in another part of your house.

The powerline device sends it's network signal of a specific frequency through your home's electrical wiring. It's perfectly safe and has been in use for many years now.

In my case, I did not want to run CAT5 cable through my house,..nor drill holes in my walls,..nor fish wires through walls. This is not as bad as I make it sound,..but I just did not want to deal with it.

While I do have an existing wireless network,..the throughput I was getting when I tried to stream movies to my home theater computer was not so good.

With the powerline adapter,...I essentially plugged them into the electrical outlets, plugged in my network cables, set the encryption on the devices, and I was good to go!

Now I can stream movies with no interruptions or hesitations.

Here's the device I brought: ZyXEL PLA401v3 HomePlug AV 200 MbpsPowerline Wall-plug Adapter (Starter Kit - 2 units)

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