Welcome to Checkmate! McMaster University’s Official Chess Club in Hamilton, ON.

Beginners Beware Series – Day 1
  The Fried Liver Attack

Hey Everyone!

So I decided to take initiative here with the tutorials. This is the first of many to come! Beyond that, I have planned out this whole series of tutorials for beginners: Beginners Beware.

If you are interested in writing your tutorials, either email them to me in a similar format, or join the team to contribute to the site in general. I will be glad to teach you how to do it on your own.

Continue reading to learn about one of the most common traps in this opening, every chess player should be familiar with.

Here’s the deal, as a chess player, you have to be confident in “guessing” what your opponent’s threats are. Especially when it may seem they just made a mistake.

Hanging Queen

Always beware of what your opponent leaves behind. Sometimes this is done on purpose. This example springs out of one of the most common openings in chess, The Giouco Piano:

1.	e4	e5
2.	Ng3	Nc6
3.	Nc3	d6
4.	Bc4	Bg4
5.	Nxe5??

Say what?! The Queen has just been exposed! This is actually a mistake. White should not try to do this. Never assume your opponent is an idiot.

Black can and should simply take back with the knight, but for the sake of the example, if the Queen is taken, mate in 2 follows.

5.		Bxd1??
6.	Bxf7+	Ke7
7.	Nd5#

Simple enough eh?

One thing I realized as I was writing this tutorial is that maybe not everyone will be familiar with the Algebraic Chess Notation I used to describe the moves here, so thank God for Wikipedia.

In a nutshell, think of the board as a Cartesian coordinate system, columns (or files) are letters A-H, rows (or ranks) are numbers 1-8. Pieces are symbolized by their first uppercase letter (except for the knights which take on the “N” instead). When the letter is omitted, people are referring to a pawn. ‘x’ means captute, ‘+’ check, ‘??’ bad move, ‘?!’ questionable move, ‘!?’ interesting move, ‘!’ and ‘!!’ mean good/great move, and ‘#’ means mate.

~Cheers,