Should young children learn chess openings?
Search for chess openings for children and you'll find lists: the Italian Game, the London System, the Scotch. It's tempting, because openings look like the thing a serious player is supposed to know. For most children under about ten, though, memorising named openings is the wrong place to put the effort — and the reasons why are worth understanding before you buy the book. This piece covers what actually helps a young beginner, whether notation matters yet, and when opening lines genuinely start to earn their place.
Should my child be learning chess openings?
Mostly not yet. For a child who is still learning to spot threats and avoid giving pieces away, memorising opening moves hands them a script without the understanding underneath — and the script stops working the moment an opponent plays something it doesn't cover. What serves a young child far better is a handful of opening principles: take the centre, get the pieces out, make the king safe. A child who understands those can play a sensible move in a position they have never seen before, which is the whole point. Named openings become useful later, once a child is playing often enough to meet the same positions again and again.
What parents mean by openings, and why memorising backfires
When parents ask about openings, they usually mean named sequences of moves — the first eight or ten moves of a recognised system. The appeal is easy to understand. It looks like real chess knowledge, it can be tested, and a child reciting the London System sounds like a child who is getting somewhere.
For a young beginner it tends to backfire, for three reasons.
- It teaches moves rather than reasons. A child plays the move because it comes next on the list. Ask them why the bishop goes there and there's often no answer, because there was never a reason attached to it.
- It stops working almost immediately. Children at beginner level do not play by the book. Somewhere around move three or four an opponent will play something unexpected, and a child who only has a memorised line has nothing to fall back on.
- It switches thinking off during the exact phase you want it switched on. A child racing through memorised moves is not looking at the board. That habit is far harder to undo later than it is to avoid now.
There's also a simpler point underneath all this. Beginners' games are almost never decided by the opening. They are decided by a hanging piece, a missed one-move threat, a queen wandering out and getting trapped. A child who knows eight moves of a named system and still leaves a piece undefended on move nine has gained nothing at all.
Parents usually mean named sequences like the Italian Game or the London System. For a young beginner these tend to backfire, because they teach moves rather than reasons, they stop working as soon as an opponent plays something unexpected, and they encourage a child to stop thinking during the opening. Beginners' games are decided by hanging pieces and missed threats, not by opening choice.
What to teach instead
The alternative is not vaguer than an opening repertoire — it's more useful. A small set of principles covers every opening ever played:
- Take the centre. Pieces and pawns in the middle of the board control more squares and reach more of the position.
- Get your pieces out. Knights and bishops belong off the back rank early. A piece sitting at home is doing nothing.
- Make the king safe. Castling early, before the position opens up, prevents most beginner disasters.
- Don't move the same piece over and over, and don't bring the queen out too early. Both waste time, and an early queen usually just gets chased around the board.
Named openings are simply specific ways of carrying these out. A child who understands why you take the centre will produce a reasonable move in a position they've never met. A child working from a memorised list will not.
This is also where teaching differs from drilling. Apps lean heavily on opening lines because lines are easy to test — right move or wrong move. Whether a child understands why the move is right is much harder to test, and it needs someone watching how they're reasoning and asking about it. We've written more about that difference in online chess lessons vs ChessKid and Chess.com.
Teach principles rather than lines: take the centre, get your pieces out, make the king safe, and avoid moving the same piece repeatedly or bringing the queen out too early. These cover every opening ever played, and they transfer to positions a child has never seen. Named openings are just particular ways of applying them.
Does my child need to learn chess notation?
Notation is the way chess moves are written down — e4, Nf3, and so on. It's the second thing parents often assume a child must learn early, and the answer is much the same: not at the start, and it should never be a barrier to playing.
Notation becomes genuinely useful when there's a reason for it: a child who wants to look back over their own games, work through a puzzle book, or play in events where moves have to be recorded. When one of those arrives, most children pick it up in a couple of sessions, because it finally does something for them.
Taught before there's a reason, it's a chore, and it makes chess feel like schoolwork at precisely the age when enjoyment is doing all the heavy lifting. It's also worth knowing that online play records games automatically, so a child can play and improve for a long time without ever writing a move down.
Not at the start. Notation is worth learning when a child has a reason for it, such as reviewing their own games, using a puzzle book, or playing in events where moves must be recorded. Most children pick it up quickly at that point. Teaching it earlier tends to feel like homework, and online play records games automatically in any case.
When openings do start to matter
None of this means openings never matter. They start to earn their place when a few things are true at once: a child is playing regularly against similar opponents and meeting the same positions repeatedly, they're no longer losing pieces to simple one-move threats, and they're playing longer games where the early moves still count by the end.
Even then, the useful version is understanding an opening's ideas rather than its moves — why that bishop goes there, what the plan is once the pieces are out. A child who knows the ideas will find good moves when the opponent deviates. A child who knows only the moves is back where they started.
Age is not really the trigger. In our experience, the moment to introduce a first opening is when a child starts asking why their games keep going wrong in the first few moves. That question means they've noticed a gap, and anything you teach them then will stick, because they went looking for it.
Openings start to matter when a child plays regularly enough to meet the same positions repeatedly, has stopped losing pieces to simple threats, and is playing longer games. Even then, understanding an opening's ideas is far more useful than memorising its moves. The signal is usually the child asking why their games keep going wrong early on.
Where to start
If your child is at the stage where they enjoy playing but you're not sure what they should be working on, that's exactly what a tutor is for — the answer differs from child to child, and it changes every few months. We run 30-minute trial classes with a real tutor, with no commitment afterwards. If you'd like to see what a lesson involves first, we've described it in what an online chess lesson for kids actually looks like.
