Chess Openings : Reti

If you have played some chess, you would know the game beyond a point needs some kind of strategy besides the tactical moves. The game of Chess typically unfolds in form of 3 broad plays: openings, middle game and then finally end game! This blog is about chess openings and Reti is one of the most interesting ways to go about it!

While you can always free wheel and pretty much start with any piece, the strategy of chess game openings involves doing:

• Control the centre of the board to dominate more parts of the board
• Involve the Queen a bit later in the game, so as to protect it with other pieces
• Evolve multiple high value pieces to be able to protect each other and create a greater threat!

As a beginner player, it’s recommended that you learn a couple of openings with White and at least 1 with black.

Starts with Knight (Chess Openings : Reti)

Reti is one such opening that starts with a knight and not a pawn, this is slightly less popular but an interesting move! You open up a knight for play and start from the right as shown below

It’s recently been gaining in popularity with rise in reti openings from ~3% to ~4.5% and has been growing. Given, the low popularity, it’s a good strategy to probably start with it since, your opponent is very unlikely to be aware of the move and not necessarily have a counter to it

Subsequent Move

The subsequent moves are quite flexible where in you can involve the other knight or a pawn! The one specific game I played a pawn to e3 to back the knight!

Middle Game

The middle game in this game, was a lopsided attack from the left side. The pawn at e4 is backed up by another pawn at d4, allowing the bishop to enter the game.

The way, the game was playing out, it was possible to put a lot of pressure on the left hand side and it eventually ended up in the same way!

End Game

The pressure on the left side with the bishop and the pawns meant we could force the black to make a mistake. The bishop taking our white pawn, meant we could force their bishop using ours

We followed this up with the bishop as mentioned and they ended using the pawn to capture our bishop, allowing us to use our rook to take thiers

The player ended up conceding by resigning but this is one way to play out the Chess Opening of Reti by capturing starting with dominating one side of the board and then heavily tilting on the other side while maintaining centre control on the right side.