50 Essential Chess Concepts – An Improver’s Blueprint by Kamryn Hellma 19 Jul 2024

These Concepts Will Take You Past the Beginner Level

If your chess journey has just begun, then there’s a lot to learn. Popular YouTuber Kamryn Hellman makes those first steps easy with these 50 essential chess tips you need to progress.

This course is a digestible introduction to some of the most crucial concepts in chess. As an adult-improver herself, Kamryn started playing chess in 2021 and quickly achieved a Chess.com rating of over 2000. This course summarizes some of the most helpful ideas that aided her lightning fast road to 2000 – putting her in the top 1% of all chess players!

The course is divided into 5 easy to follow sections, with 10 concepts in each –

💡 Rules for Developing – the importance of bringing all of your pieces to the party
💡 Rules for Active Pieces – how to arrange your pieces harmoniously and maximize their efficiency
💡 Rules for Trading Pieces – helping you figure out the nuances of what a “good piece” and “bad piece” are
💡 Rules for Attacking – to encourage you to look for the most aggressive moves and build your attacks
💡 Rules for the Endgame – fewer pieces doesn’t mean fewer complications and this chapter gives you guidance on converting your advantage

Each rule comes with a puzzle to reinforce your learning and the majority of examples are compositions by the author. The course starts off with basic ideas, to build your foundation, but quickly moves onto more advanced concepts.

Develop with tempo! Can you see how best to develop here?

Never give up! Can you figure out why Black’s extra queen doesn’t save them?

Activate your king! It’s important for the king to cover these key infiltration squares

Kamryn Hellman is an American chess player who started playing chess as an adult and is now over 2100 on chess.com. She’s a chess coach and content creator, with over 24,000 subscribers on YouTube.

If you’re looking for an introduction to studying chess, this course is digestible enough that you won’t have to spend months toiling through it. You’ll be able to understand the material in a reasonable amount of time and improve your game far beyond the beginner level.