If you absolutely suck at chess, worse than I do, this advice may be helpful.

The single most important thing you can do is choose your opponent wisely. If he is good, you're dead meat. Pick someone who sucks. If you are playing the computer, set it to suck.

The first thing you do is move a center pawn up two. Just make sure you aren't moving it to a spot where it will be immediately taken, depending on what the opponent just did.

Then bring your two knights up, forward two, and toward the center.

Your next three moves might be to bring out your two bishops, and your other center pawn. Move the bishops somewhere near the center of the board, or else threatening the king and queen.

All the while, of course, making sure nothing of yours is under attack, and always seeing if the opponent has left something vulnerable and undefended. If he did, God does he suck, unless he is a super player and is suckering you in.

I'm sure that this opening has a name. I don't know what that name is. There are other openings with other names, but I don't know them. I think one of them involves putting your bishop only on the second row, on the side, in front of the knight's square, but I can't be bothered learning a second opening. I'd screw it up.

Now bring your queen up somewhere. Then castle. That's it, that's my opening game. If someone tells you that my opening is no good for some reason, don't play him cause he'll kill you.

Middle game. My first strategy is to trade pieces whenever I can, even if it makes my overall position a little worse. The main thing for me is to simplify by removing pieces from the board, because the more pieces on the board, the more mistakes I make. I can't keep track of all the pieces. Best to get rid of them.

Okay, you can stop laughing at me now.

If I find that I have more pawns in a certain part of the board than the opponent, I start thinking about moving those pawns up and getting myself a queen. I start thinking of what pieces I can use to support those pawns, and also for them to support each other.

I look for forks and skewers. I know that "fork" is a chess term. I'm not so sure about "skewer". Maybe I made that up, maybe I read it, who knows. In any event, a fork is when you can move a piece somewhere and simultaneously attack two pieces. Like if you can move a knight somewhere and it simultaneously attacks his king and his queen. That is very cool. His king has to run away, you take his queen, HA!

By skewer I mean if two pieces are on the same row, and you can line up your rook or queen on that row, or a bishop on that diagonal. This way you are threatening both of those pieces at once. Depending what's going on, you might be trapping the piece, forcing it to stay put as a blocker. If it moves, you take the one behind it, that sort of thing.

I like to have my knights right in the middle of the board. As the game progresses, I like to have my knights forward near his king. No particular reason, just I like them there. You never know when that will prove useful.

If I have any advantage at all in pieces, I like to trade like mad. If you have a small advantage, like being up a pawn, and most of the pieces are still on the board, your lead doesn't mean all that much and can be erased in a flash. But if you trade off like crazy, leaving very few pieces on the board, your one pawn lead becomes huge. You will be able to turn it into a queen.

Near the end of the game, if you have chosen wisely and your opponent sucks worse than you do, you will be chasing his king all over the place. In that case, keep checking the king, every chance you get. Otherwise you may end up in a tie. After playing a whole big game, taking a big lead, victory so close you can feel it, just one time you fail to check the king and next thing you know it is a tie game and you feel like a dork. It is a tie if there is nowhere for his king to go, nothing for him to do at all, but he's not in check. So keep checking, checking, checking, to avoid the screwup of letting your win escape you by forcing a tie.