Scholar’s Mate: Key Takeaways
There are some very important things this short game should mark:
1) The Scholar’s Mate is very easy to prevent, and now you know how to do it.
2) While White was playing around with two pieces (his king and queen), black caught up in development while starving off his opponent’s threats, which gave him an advantage in force.
3) In chess, you cannot prevail if the opponent (a general rule of thumb) has superior development and/or piece placement. While white was lagging behind in development, black managed to gain those exact two advantages to his benefit.
4) Although the Queen is often seen as a “bully,” it was pushed around by pieces of less value. While this may be a strange concept to the average player, in most circumstances, you do not want to lose your queen to lower-value pieces, so it is often forced to dodge attacks from other pieces.
And now some important lessons:
1) While it’s tempting to use your queen right away, developing your other pieces first so they can support your stronger pieces, and surviving to a middlegame is more important. Minimizing early losses is key to your chess development.
This is like in war, you send your strongest soldier out first, but they end up falling to many foot soldiers. Numbers will always prevail.
2) Be very careful! There are lots of opportunities in chess where you can make mistakes. More often than not you will make those mistakes, but minimizing them is always better. 🙂
As you have learned, the Scholar’s Mate is not a sound opening: while it may work against complete beginners, more advanced players will know how to counter it, and gain an opening advantage. With this in mind, it is important to learn proper Chess openings for both White and Black. This is important for several reasons:
1) Playing solid openings will ensure that you will give up an advantage in the early game. Remember, minimizing early losses is key to your chess development. If you want to avoid losing in 10 moves or less, then playing a solid opening is essential.
2) If you play established opening lines against your opponents, more often than not, you will gain a large advantage simply due to the fact that beginners won’t know how to counter solid opening lines.
I will be covering the most common opening moves for White: 1. e4 and 2. d4, and good opening choices for both White and Black in response to these moves. Chess.com has a good article covering other good openings for beginners if you want to read about more openings.
