This opens Part One, which Rozman pitches at players roughly 0–800 Elo and at stronger players shoring up fundamentals: how games are won, lost, and drawn; opening play with each color; basic and middlegame checkmates; attacking, defending, and combining pieces; and core strategy. Some of it may already be familiar — the point is a complete foundation before Part Two.
A book called How to Win at Chess should start by nailing down what "winning" literally means. It also helps to start small: throwing all thirty-two pieces at a beginner at once is overwhelming, so first strip checkmate down to the fewest pieces that can produce it.
Checkmate is an attack on the king that cannot be answered: the king cannot move to safety, no piece can block the attacking line, and nothing can capture the attacker. Whatever piece is delivering the check would capture the king on the very next move if the game continued, so the game stops immediately instead.
The smallest possible checkmate uses just three pieces total: the two kings and one attacker. Below, the White queen on e7 is adjacent to the Black king on e8. The king can't step to d8 or f8 because the queen covers both diagonally, and it can't capture the queen because White's own king, standing right behind it on e6, would then be attacking the Black king — which is never allowed to happen in chess.
Adding one more piece gives a four-piece checkmate. Here the bishop on g7 attacks the king along the diagonal, the White king on g6 defends the bishop so it can't be captured, and the knight on h6 covers the two remaining escape squares.
The same logic scales up to a busy, fully developed position — only the details change, never the underlying idea. Below, Black's king has wandered to d4 in the middle of the board. White's dark-squared bishop on e3 delivers the check, and every square the king might flee to is either occupied by a defended White piece or directly attacked by one.
Whether the board holds three pieces or thirty, checkmate is the same event: no escape, no block, no capture. Losing your king to a wandering attack in the middle of a crowded board, as in the diagram above, usually comes from moving it out too early or neglecting to get it to safety — a mistake this book will help you avoid.
Checkmate doesn't need dozens of moves. Two well-known short mates show how quickly a careless start can end a game.
The Scholar's Mate is a four-move checkmate that, according to online chess databases such as Lichess and Chessbase, has been reached close to a million times. White brings the queen out early to attack the weak f7 square (a square defended only by Black's king), develops a bishop to add a second attacker, and — if Black doesn't defend correctly — delivers mate.
Around 30 percent of players who reach the mating position online still fail to find Qxf7# and let the win slip away. If you get here, don't get distracted — finish the checkmate.
Even faster is the Fool's Mate, checkmate in just two moves — the quickest possible checkmate in chess. It requires cooperation from White, but it shows how badly weakening the squares around your own king can backfire immediately.
Both traps make the same point from opposite sides: rushing your queen out on move two isn't a good long-term plan for the attacker, and weakening the squares in front of your own king is dangerous for the defender. Checkmate remains the most common way that chess games are won.
The second most common way a game ends is resignation — one player voluntarily gives up rather than play on to checkmate. This usually happens after an overwhelming material loss, or when checkmate is clearly unavoidable a few moves away. Online, resignation is a button click; over the board, it's a word and a handshake.
A high-profile example: in the 2014 World Championship, Viswanathan Anand resigned game 11 against defending champion Magnus Carlsen — and with it, the entire twelve-game match. Rozman himself tracks results by method: according to Chess.com's Insights feature, 55 percent of his wins come by resignation, versus 24 percent on time and 20 percent by checkmate, a reminder that resignation decides most games above beginner level.
At elite level, resigning before the actual mate is good etiquette — playing on can look disrespectful to a much stronger opponent — but that norm stops at club level. Below master, the advice flips: don't resign. Keep playing while there are pieces and time left, because opponents at every other level blunder, and a lost position isn't a finished one.
Being down material is not the same as being lost. Unless you are actually facing forced, unavoidable checkmate, make your opponent prove it by finding the win over the board.
Most competitive chess — online or over the board — is played with a clock, and running out of time loses the game outright, regardless of what's happening on the board. Online time controls range from bullet (as little as one minute for the whole game) to correspondence chess (days per move); over-the-board games commonly last three to six hours, with a frequent format being 90 minutes per player plus a 30-second increment added after every move.
Material advantage means nothing once the flag falls. In the position below, Black has an overwhelming lead — up a queen and a rook — and even has a checkmate available in one move. But if Black's own clock reaches zero first, White wins on time regardless. Try to find the mate before you press Show solution — there's actually more than one way to deliver it.
There is one important exception, called insufficient material. If the side whose clock is still running does not have enough pieces left to deliver checkmate under any sequence of moves — for example, if all they have left is a lone king — then a flag fall against the other player is ruled a draw instead of a loss, because no result was ever reachable by checkmate anyway.
This rule surprises a lot of newer players, but it exists so that a result nobody could have produced on the board — a checkmate from a side with no mating material — can never be awarded on time alone.
The last, and rarest, way to win is abandonment: a player simply stops playing instead of resigning or letting the clock run out on its own. It's most common online, where a losing player might just close the app, but it happens over the board too.
The most famous example comes from Hastings, England, 1895, when Wilhelm Steinitz — the first official World Chess Champion — reached a winning position against Curt von Bardeleben.
Rather than play on or formally resign, von Bardeleben got up from the table and left the tournament hall entirely — disgusted, most likely, that he'd been outplayed so cleanly and could see the forced finish coming as clearly as Steinitz could. Steinitz had to wait for his opponent's clock to run out before the win was official; he then demonstrated to the watching crowd that he had calculated a forced checkmate nine moves deep, to enthusiastic applause. The game itself is still studied today as one of the finest attacking performances of the nineteenth century.
Four ways to end a game. Checkmate — no escape, no block, no capture — from the bare three-piece minimum up to the Scholar's and Fool's Mates that punish a careless opening. Resignation, the real leader above beginner level: expected manners once a strong player's loss is truly inevitable, but never advisable below master level, since opponents at every other level blunder constantly. Timing out ends the game regardless of the position, except when insufficient material turns a time forfeit into a draw. And abandonment — walking away instead of resigning, as at Hastings 1895 — only becomes official once the clock finishes the job.
The king must be in check, the king must have no square to move to that escapes the check, and there must be no way to block the check or capture the checking piece.
Three: the two kings plus one attacking piece (for example a queen), with the defending king positioned so the attacker is protected and every escape square is covered.
Because it is defended only by Black's own king — no other piece guards it from the starting position — which makes it an easy early target for a queen-and-bishop attack.
At elite level the loss is a near-certainty, so playing on can look disrespectful. Below master level opponents blunder far more often, so playing on for real practical chances is entirely normal.
It's a draw, not a loss, because the player with only a king has insufficient material to ever deliver checkmate — and a side that could never mate cannot be credited with a win purely on time.
Resignation is a deliberate, acknowledged decision to stop — a click or a handshake. Abandonment is walking away or disconnecting without any formal resignation, so the game only ends once the abandoning player's clock expires.
Von Bardeleben never resigned — he simply walked away. Since the game hadn't ended by checkmate or resignation, Steinitz had to wait for von Bardeleben's clock to run out before the win counted as official.
White was about to win both of Black's remaining queenside pawns and then promote one of his own, which leads to an easily won position. With no way to stop that plan, playing on would only have delayed an inevitable loss.
Resignation, at 55 percent — well ahead of winning on time (24 percent) or by checkmate (20 percent). It suggests that above complete-beginner level, most games are decided well before an actual checkmate appears on the board.