This chapter is not a complete openings manual — entire books are dedicated to that, and this is one chapter. The goal here is to understand the reasoning behind good opening play with White, since White moves first and therefore sets the early agenda of the game. In theory you're free to play any legal first move; nothing stops you from doing something bizarre. In practice, though, chess is unlike sports where copying the pros requires their years of training — the best moves are simply sitting there, free for anyone to play, so there's little reason not to borrow from centuries of accumulated practice instead of reinventing the wheel.
Openings are named after the players or places associated with their development. The Italian Game, for instance, traces back to the seventeenth-century Italian player Gioachino Greco. From the starting position, White has 20 legal first moves (each pawn can move one or two squares, and each knight has two options); Black then has 20 replies, producing 400 possible positions after just one move each. Push that out to four moves each and the American mathematician Claude Shannon once calculated the total at roughly 85 billion possible positions — and that's a wildly conservative early snapshot of how fast the game's complexity explodes. The good news: the vast majority of that space is nonsense nobody with a basic understanding of chess would ever play, which is exactly why opening principles matter. They narrow an enormous menu of options down to a small set of moves that are known to work, rather than leaving you guessing among billions of possibilities.
Before memorizing any specific opening, three principles guide almost every good opening move: control the center, develop your pieces, and castle your king.
| Do | Don't |
|---|---|
| Take the center with pawns and pieces | Push flank pawns or pieces to the edge of the board |
| Develop your knights and bishops | Move the same piece twice without a good reason (such as winning material safely) |
| Castle your king to safety | Bring your queen out early |
The center matters because it's the most valuable real estate on the board: a piece placed centrally can reach all three sectors of the board — the queenside, the central d- and e-files, and the kingside — while a piece stuck in a corner sees very little. A knight on one of the four central squares has eight possible moves; the same knight in a corner has only two. More mobility means more potential threats and better support for your other pieces.
Developing means moving pieces off their starting squares onto more active ones — generally knights and bishops before the queen or rooks. Castling tucks the king away in the corner and activates a rook at the same time, and was covered in detail in the previous chapters. All three principles work together: you can't develop pieces without giving up some central space temporarily, and you can't castle safely until your king's escape route is clear.
It helps to first imagine an opponent who simply doesn't move, so you can see the ideal version of a White setup uninterrupted. Playing this way, White would push both central pawns two squares (1. e4 and 2. d4), develop both knights toward the center (Nc3 and Nf3), develop both bishops actively (Bc4 and Bf4), castle short (O-O), and finally centralize the queen and connect the rooks (Qd2, Rad1, Rfe1). Ten moves later, every piece is developed, the king is safe, and every piece defends another.
You will never actually get ten free moves in a row. The golden moves are a target to aim for, not a fixed recipe — real games are a constant negotiation over the same squares and development tempo.
1. e4, the King's Pawn Opening, is the single most popular first move in chess — roughly twice as common as 1. d4. It immediately stakes a claim on the center and opens lines for the queen and the light-squared bishop. Black's most common reply is 1...e5, mirroring White's central claim; this exact position has been reached tens of millions of times online.
After 1. e4 e5, White typically develops a knight to attack the e5 pawn (2. Nf3), and Black defends it by developing a knight of their own (2...Nc6). From here, White's bishop can go to two different squares, leading to two of the oldest openings in chess.
The Ruy López was named after the sixteenth-century Spanish priest Ruy López de Segura and remains one of the most-played openings at the highest level, including in the 2021 World Championship match between Magnus Carlsen and Ian Nepomniachtchi.
Black doesn't have to answer 1. e4 with 1...e5 at all. Playing 1...c5 instead is the Sicilian Defense, one of Black's sharpest replies, first documented in 1813 when the English master Jacob Henry Sarratt translated an old Italian manuscript referring to il gioco Siciliano — the Sicilian game. One heavily analyzed branch is the Najdorf Variation, named after the Polish-Argentinian grandmaster Miguel Najdorf, sometimes called the Rolls-Royce of openings for Black: 1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nf6 5. Nc3 a6, where Black's last move stops White from ever landing a piece on b5.
All three openings live on the same tree, so the board below shows them as one: step through the shared moves once, and pick a variation to follow it from the point where it leaves the others. A variation marked ⑂ branches off at exactly the position you are looking at.
1. d4, the Queen's Pawn Opening, is White's second most popular first move; together, 1. e4 and 1. d4 account for roughly 80 percent of all games. The same center-develop-castle principles apply, but the resulting positions and typical plans differ substantially from e4 openings — which is exactly why it's better to commit to one and study it deeply rather than splitting your attention between both.
One of the simplest d4 systems to learn is the London System, where White develops the dark-squared bishop to f4 before it gets blocked in by its own pawns. Another common continuation is the Queen's Gambit — "Queen's" because it involves the d-pawn's file, and "gambit" because White offers Black a pawn on c4. (Yes, it's also where the Netflix show borrowed its title; Rozman figures the show is responsible for a big share, maybe 90 to 95 percent, of the newer viewers who found their way to his own channels.) If Black grabs the pawn, that's the Queen's Gambit Accepted; White then plays e4, claiming full control of the center in exchange for the temporarily sacrificed pawn, which White typically wins back later. Declining the gambit instead — never capturing on c4 and supporting the d-pawn with e6 — is the Queen's Gambit Declined, the more solid, more commonly recommended choice for Black.
All three systems share the same first two moves, 1. d4 d5, so the board below shows them as one tree: step through the shared trunk once, then pick a variation to follow it from where it leaves the others.
Play a normal string of developing moves after the London's 2. Bf4 — knight to f3, e3 to support the center, a bishop to d3, the other knight to d2, and short castling — and it reaches a recognizable, repeatable structure without much need to memorize sharp theory.
Chapter 1 showed the Scholar's Mate as an example of an early checkmate; it's worth revisiting here because it directly breaks the principles from this chapter. Bringing the queen out on move two violates "develop knights and bishops first," and if Black knows how to respond, White ends up with an exposed queen and nothing to show for it. The finished mate has been delivered well over 600,000 times online — and, almost unbelievably, close to 30 percent of the players who reach the position one move before mate, over 250,000 of them, still fail to find Qxf7# and let the win slip away.
Before Black ever reaches the losing continuation from Chapter 1, there's an even worse mistake Black can make first, right after 2. Qh5. See if you can work out Black's safest reply — and spot why a natural-looking response to the queen's attack is actually a losing blunder — before you check the solution.
Whether Black falls for the full four-move mate from Chapter 1 or defends properly with 2...Nc6, the lesson for White is the same either way: this line only works against an unprepared opponent, and it leaves White's own development and king safety worse than a normal opening the moment it fails. It's worth knowing how the trap works so you never fall for it as Black, but it's not a plan to build your own opening repertoire around. Landing it might make an overmatched friend think you're the second coming of Bobby Fischer or Judit Polgár, but it won't survive anyone who has faced it before.
An early queen sortie can win a quick game against a beginner, but a prepared opponent will develop normally, gain time by attacking the queen, and leave White behind in development for no compensation.
Whichever first move you choose, the same three jobs apply: control the center, develop your knights and bishops before your queen, and castle early — the golden moves are what it looks like if you get to do all of that uninterrupted, which you never quite will. 1. e4 opens the door to the Italian Game and Ruy López after 1...e5, or to sharper territory like the Sicilian and its Najdorf branch if Black avoids ...e5 altogether. 1. d4 leads to a different family — the London System, and the Queen's Gambit in either its Accepted or Declined form — and together e4 and d4 cover roughly 80 percent of all games, so there's little reason to look further as a beginner. Pick one main first move and one main reply to each of Black's common responses, then stick with it long enough to actually understand the resulting positions, rather than splitting your attention thin across both. And keep the four-move Scholar's Mate in your back pocket only as something to recognize and defend against — not as a serious weapon, since it collapses the moment an opponent knows the refutation.
Pieces placed centrally can reach all three sectors of the board (queenside, center files, kingside) and have far more available squares — a knight in the center has eight possible moves versus two in a corner — which means more mobility and more potential threats.
The golden moves assume an opponent who never interferes, which never happens in a real game. They're a target that shows what a fully developed, well-coordinated position looks like, not a fixed sequence you can force through.
3. Bc4 reaches the Italian Game, aiming the bishop at f7. 3. Bb5 reaches the Ruy López, pinning/pressuring the knight that defends the e5 pawn.
It stops White from ever placing a knight or bishop on b5, since that square is now covered by the pawn. It's the move that gives the Najdorf Variation its name.
Accepting (2...dxc4) hands White full central control after 3. e4 in exchange for a pawn White usually wins back — a difficult way for Black to play. Declining (2...e6) keeps the position solid and reinforces the center instead of grabbing material.
It wins the e5 pawn with check, and it simultaneously attacks the rook on h8 along the now-open long diagonal (since Black's g-pawn no longer blocks it) — a fork that costs Black the exchange or worse.
Because it only works against opponents who don't know how to defend it. Against correct play, White's queen gets kicked around while wasting time, leaving White's own development and king safety worse off than after a normal opening.
Mathematician Claude Shannon put it at about 85 billion. Since almost all of that space is nonsense nobody sound would ever play, opening principles exist to narrow the enormous menu down to the small handful of moves actually worth knowing.
Every minor piece reaches an active, defended square (bishop out to f4 before it's boxed in, the other bishop and both knights developed naturally) and the king is castled — the same underlying goals as the golden moves, reached through a repeatable, low-theory move order.
Because the opening it's named after is one he's covering, and because he credits the show with bringing a large share — by his estimate, 90 to 95 percent — of his newer viewers to chess in the first place.