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chess.md

@@ -1,6 +1,8 @@
 # Chess
 
-Chess is a very [old](old.md) two-player board [game](game.md), perhaps most famous and popular among all board games in [history](history.md). It is a [complete information](complete_information.md) game that simulates a battle of two armies on an 8x8 board with different battle pieces. Chess is also called the King's Game, it has a world-wide competitive community and is considered an intellectual [sport](sport.md) but it's also been a topic of research (as the estimated number of chess games is bigger than [googol](googol.md), it is unlikely to ever be solved) and [programming](programming.md) (many chess engines, [AI](ai.md)s and frontends are being actively developed). Chess is similar to games such [shogi](shogi.md) ("Japanese chess"), [xiangqi](xiangqi.md) ("Chinese chess") and [checkers](checkers.md).
+Chess is a very [old](old.md) two-player board [game](game.md), perhaps most famous and popular among all board games in [history](history.md). It is a [complete information](complete_information.md) game that simulates a battle of two armies on an 8x8 board with different battle pieces (also called *chessmen*). Chess is also called the King's Game, it has a world-wide competitive community and is considered an intellectual [sport](sport.md) but it's also been a topic of research (as the estimated number of chess games is bigger than [googol](googol.md), it is unlikely to ever be solved) and [programming](programming.md) (many chess engines, [AI](ai.md)s and frontends are being actively developed). Chess is similar to games such [shogi](shogi.md) ("Japanese chess"), [xiangqi](xiangqi.md) ("Chinese chess") and [checkers](checkers.md).
+
+Note on terminology: the term *piece* is sometimes used to exclude pawns or in other ways, in this article we will for simplicity call any chessman, including a pawn, a piece. 
 
 { There is a nice black and white indie movie called *Computer Chess* about chess programmers of the 1980s, it's pretty good, very oldschool, starring real programmers and chess players, check it out. ~drummyfish }
 
@@ -174,6 +176,27 @@ A player cannot make a move that would leave him in check!
 
 Threefold repetition is a rule allowing a player to claim a draw if the same position (piece positions, player's turn, castling rights, en passant state) occurs three times (not necessarily consecutively). The 50 move rule allows a player to claim a draw if no pawn has moved and no piece has been captured in last 50 moves (both players making their move counts as a single move here).
 
+## Playing Tips
+
+Some general tips and rules of thumb, mostly for beginners:
+
+- Try to control the center of the board (D4, D5, E4, E5).
+- Don't bring the queen out too early, the opponent can harass it and get ahead in development.
+- Learn some universal setup openings or "systems" to play, e.g. London, King's Indian, the hippo etc.
+- Develop your pieces before attacking, usually knights go out before bishops, bishops are well placed on the longest diagonals as "snipers".
+- Learn basic tactics, especially forks and pins.
+- King safety is extremely important until endgame, castle very early but not extremely early. In the endgame (with queens out) king joins the battle as another active piece.
+- Pawn structure is very important.
+- Watch out for back rank checkmates, make an escape square for your king.
+- Rooks want to be on open files, you also want to CONNECT them (have both guard each other). Also a rook in the opponents second row (2nd/7th rank) is pretty good.
+- Bishops are generally seen a bit more valuable than knights, especially in pairs -- if you can trade your knight for opponent's bishop, it's often good. If your opponent has two bishops and you only have one, you want to trade yours for his so he doesn't have the pair. A knight pair is also pretty powerful though, especially when the knights are guarding each other.
+- "Knight on a rim is dim" (knights are best placed near the center).
+- An extremely strong formation is both rooks and the queen on the same open file.
+- Blocking the opponents piece so that it can't move is almost as good as taking it. And vice versa: you want to activate all your pieces if possible.
+- Don't play "hope chess", always suppose your opponent will play the best move he can.
+- If you can achieve something with multiple pieces, usually it's best to do it with the weakest one.
+- TODO: moar
+
 ## LRS Chess
 
 Chess is only mildly [bloated](bloat.md) but what if we try to unbloat it completely? Here we propose the LRS version of chess. The rule changes against normal chess are: