How The Chess Website Helps Beginners Learn to Play Chess

The Chess Website is a chess instruction and practice site aimed at players at any level, including complete beginners. For someone starting from zero, its beginner path is straightforward: it teaches how each piece moves, explains the key ideas behind each piece, then introduces opening principles and the concepts every player should know before the first moves of a game. From there, the site points you to openings material and online play so you can apply what you learned.

The beginner learning path

The site's own description of its "Learn To Play" section lays out a sequence rather than a pile of disconnected lessons:

1. Understand the pieces. You are shown how each piece moves, then walked through key concepts to think about with that piece.
2. Learn opening principles. After the pieces, the material covers what every chess player should know when approaching the start of a game.
3. Move into openings and play. The beginner area links out to chess openings content and to playing chess online.

That order matters for a new player: piece movement is the prerequisite for everything else, and opening principles only make sense once you know what the pieces can do.

What the site covers beyond the basics

The Chess Website is not only a beginner course. Its main sections, as described on the site, are:

For a beginner, the practical value is in the first three rows. Tournament analysis and engine analysis become more useful once you have games of your own to review.

Practice and reinforcement

Reading about piece movement does not make you a player, so the site pairs instruction with play. Its "Play Chess Online" section gives you a place to use what you have learned, and the site also references practice games as part of its offering. The engine in the Chess Analysis section is a second feedback loop: you can put a position in and get recommendations, which is a way to check your thinking without a coach present.

What it costs and how access works

The site displays a "Join Now" call to action for "Unlimited Access To All Of Our Strategies, Practice Games And More," which indicates that full access is tied to a membership. The available page material does not state a price for that membership, so treat the cost as something to confirm on the site before subscribing.

Separately, the site lists physical products with visible prices: T-Shirts at $15.00 and The Chess Website Chess DVDs at $50.00. These are merchandise, not the membership.

Who it suits

The site describes itself as a fit for both newcomers and lifelong players, and its structure supports that: a beginner can stay in the Learn To Play, Openings, and Play Online sections, while a more experienced player can use tournament coverage and the analysis engine. If you are starting from zero, the useful test is whether the piece-by-piece instruction and opening principles are enough to get you into your first games — the site's design suggests that is exactly the intended path.

The site also says it is continually updated based on suggestions from the chess community, and invites users to email ideas for additions. User testimonials on the page come from subscribers such as Charles Fairchild, Kyle Shevlin, and Justin Wilcox, who describe the instructional videos and game analysis as easy to follow — useful as a signal of what the video content is like, though these are individual impressions rather than a guarantee of fit.