Should I learn openings or endgames first?

Start with mates you can finish, and with opening habits you can explain. Save long opening lines for later.

• Usually learn basic checkmates and a few simple endgames before memorized opening lines.
• In the opening, control the center, develop the pieces, and castle.
• Add a specific opening later, when your own games show which one keeps costing you.
• At beginner and club level, hanging pieces and missed tactics often decide the game before opening theory does.
• A weekly focus can rotate mates, king-and-pawn basics, one small opening repertoire, and a review of your own games. That focus is not a rating plan.
• For a coach, the student's biggest recurring weakness usually sets the order. Endgame-first is a valid teaching order, not a rule.

At beginner and club level, games are often decided by hanging pieces and missed tactics before a memorized line matters.

A line you remember still loses if a piece is loose or a check goes unanswered. The check for that is how to stop blundering. Opening principles still belong in the first weeks: control the center, develop, and castle. Those are habits, not a stack of variations.

Specific openings come later, when the same line keeps showing up in your losses. How to choose that small set is which openings to learn: usually one system as White and one reply each to 1.e4 and 1.d4, after the principles are in place.

Basic endgames teach how the pieces cooperate, and they give you a way to convert a win once the tactics quiet down.

Chapter I of Chess Fundamentals (1921) begins with simple mates. José Raúl Capablanca writes: "The first thing a student should do, is to familiarise himself with the power of the pieces. This can best be done by learning how to accomplish quickly some of the simple mates." The next section is "Some Simple Mates," and the first example is king and rook against king. The wording is from the Project Gutenberg text of that book, eBook #33870.

King and queen against king, and king and rook against king, are the usual first mates. They show that the king has to help the major piece. A few king-and-pawn endings come next, because a won game often becomes a race of kings and a passed pawn. That is a starting set, not a full endgame course.

Use one focus for the week, then keep tactics and one reviewed game going beside it. The list is a schedule you can finish. It is not a promise about rating.

1. Basic mates: king and queen against a lone king, and king and rook against a lone king. On Lichess Practice, the Checkmates lesson Piece Checkmates I includes chapters named Queen mate and Rook mate.
2. King-and-pawn basics: how the kings oppose each other, and which squares the king needs to reach. Lichess Practice lists those ideas under Pawn Endgames as Key Squares and Opposition.
3. Opening principles, plus one system as White and one reply each to 1.e4 and 1.d4. The plans, not a long memorized tree, are in which openings to learn.
4. Ongoing tactics, plus a review of your own games. Replay a game without an engine first, which is how to analyze your own chess games.

What about the middlegame?

The middlegame is the stretch after the pieces are out and before a simple ending. Basic mates and opening principles do not replace a plan there. Threats, the pawn structure, the least active piece, and a short idea are how to improve your chess middlegame.

Usually start from the student's biggest recurring weakness. Endgame-first is a valid teaching order. It is not a rule for every student.

If the games are full of hanging pieces, the next lessons are often checks, captures, and loose pieces, even when the student asked for an opening. If wins keep slipping away in simple endings, the next lessons are often the basic mates. Many coaches mix the phases in the same week: a mate, an opening principle, and one game from the student's own play.

The order follows the games in front of you. A method that begins with simple mates is still a common approach. Capablanca's book begins Chapter I that way. Mixing phases is common too.

The Chess Fingerprint can show which opening scores worst, and whether longer games score worse than shorter ones. The fingerprint suggests a focus from its top leak; treat it as a signal, not a verdict.

Best and worst openings appear when you have at least 4 games in that line, and an opening leak is flagged when the worst score is 40% or less. Those cutoffs are this app's display rules. The score in games of 40 full moves or fewer is compared with the score in longer games. When shorter games score at least 10 points higher, and there are at least 10 longer games, one leak card is titled "Long games slip away — your endgame is the leak." That card's fix is endgame study. The report ranks the leaks and shows the first one as the next action. The same leak list goes into the weekly plan.

A deep scan is separate. It groups moves with the app's phase rule: if six or fewer pieces other than pawns and kings are left, the move is an endgame; otherwise a move on or before move 10 is an opening, and a later move is a middlegame. It reports average centipawns lost per move in each phase, plus blunder and mistake counts. A blunder is an evaluation drop of at least 200 centipawns, and a mistake is at least 100 and under 200. Positions already decided on both sides of the move are not counted as blunders. The phase with the highest average is the one the scan marks as needing the most work.