GW's First Attempt at
Basic Chess Strategy,
January 2010
[Introduction]

When I first setup Chess-Game-Strategies.com, I considered myself to be a relative beginner. I knew of the game; I knew how the pieces moved; I knew how to setup the board. But, beyond that, I'd nothing much to shout about ...

I'd never played competitive chess, just random games against family (probably less than a dozen at most);

I didn't (and, as of January 2012, still don't) have any FIDE or ELO rating score;

The only Chess players I'd heard of were Nigel Short ('cause he was England's strongest Chess player and was in the news, due to his challenge on Garry Kasparov, for the World Chess Championship, in 1993) and Garry Kasparov ('cause he was THE player of the 90s, and his name was nearly everywhere, when I started to become aware of Chess).

Years back (the 1990's era), I'd seen my older cousin play and win games against, erm, 'skill-limited' family members. My first attempt at basic Chess Strategy is/was, essentially, my scattered recollection of what he did to win his games.

Fastforward to 2010 and, after bit of reading-up online (well, on Wikipedia, mostly), I'd learnt a little bit more about this so-called game of Chess ...

Over the course of a typical game of Chess - in other words, we're not counting the Famous Quick Checkmate games - I was aware that you can roughly split the overall play into three sections, stages, or Phases (as I usually call them) ...

Opening Phase
Middlegame Phase
Endgame Phase

So, that's how I approached things, when I set out to record my first attempt at what I thought of as a Basic Chess Strategy, which begins with the Objectives (Planning how to play my game against Fritz 12), on the next page ...

Moving On: Objectives (Page 2).