The Opening: Avoid Exploiting Your Queen

If you've taken a look at the information under The Opening then you've noticed that I've listed Avoid Exploiting Your Queen as the number 5 principle to consider during the opening phase of a chess game. You may have heard grandmasters list as a rule of thumb to not bring your queen out early in the chess game. That is excellent advice for the opening, but the principle is of absolutely no use to a player once the opening is over with. So as to have a principle that chiefly involves the queen throughout the entire game of chess, I've used the idea of "exploiting" the queen, rather than simply be generic and say "don't move the queen out early." But what exactly is exploiting your queen you may ask? Well the definition of exploiting that we're using in this case is:

"To use selfishly for one's own ends."



You see by moving your queen out to attack early, like the grandmasters warn against, you are really being selfish with your queen. Why is that? Well while your queen does make an excellent attacker in chess, she also makes an excellent target for your opponent early in the game. So while you may think you're accomplishing something worthwhile by an early queen attack, most likely all you are doing is wasting a turn. Moreover, not only will the queen selfishly slow down your development rate, but she could actually become an innocent casualty if you're not too careful!

In the following article in this series we will go into more detail on the idea of exploiting your queen.