How To PUNISH Early Queen Attacks

Hey guys , today , we're talking about how to punish your opponents when they make the mistake of bringing out their queen early .

And yes , I'm calling it a mistake because if you know what to do , you're gonna be getting into a great position right out of the opening .

Now , first things first , this is called the Wayward queen attack .

E four , E five , queen H five .

It's actually a legitimate opening , but a bad one .

The idea is that white is attacking your E five pawn , which is undefended .

And if you play the mistake G six , which quite a few beginners will fall into , they're gonna take that pawn with check and they're gonna take your rook in the corner on the next move and you're already losing .

That's one idea .

And the other idea is that if you play something like knight to C six , they're gonna play bishop to C four and they're threatening check mate if you don't see that .

Well , the game is over in four moves .

This is known as scholars mate .

However , if you don't fall for one of those two tricks , there's really not much else that white is threatening and I'm gonna teach you concepts and ideas that you can use against any type of early queen attacks to get into a really good position .

Let's go ahead and get started .

So the number one concept that you want to keep in mind when your opponent brings out their queen super early is that you need to gain as many tempo as you can on that queen .

What do I mean by that ?

You need to attack that queen as many times as you can with your four pieces .

Ideally , you would like to attack it with all of them .

And sometimes that actually happens , I'll show you a good example of that here in just a second .

But the goal is try to develop as many of these pieces as you can while at the same time , attack , attacking that queen .

Now in this particular position , this pawn is being attacked .

So it makes sense to make a move like night to C six to defend that .

However , in just a minute , I'm going to show you that you don't actually even have to defend that pawn .

There's a really tricky line you can play which we'll come back to in just a minute .

But let's say we defend the pawn and now our opponent just plays a random move like knight to C three .

I'm gonna play the move 92 F six because I'm developing a piece and I'm attacking that queen at the same time .

Why is this so powerful because I'm basically getting a free move .

My opponent doesn't have time to develop their pieces or they're gonna lose their queen .

They have to move it somewhere .

Let's say they make the mistake and move it to H three .

What am I gonna do now ?

I'm gonna play the move D five Y because it's helping me develop this piece .

And at the same time , I'm attacking the queen .

Let's say white moves queen to F three .

What am I gonna do ?

I'm gonna play bishop to G four .

I'm developing a piece and I'm attacking the queen .

And this is kind of the dream , right ?

Like if you can accomplish this , you're gonna have your whole army developed , ready to try to check me your opponent and all the opponent's pieces are gonna be sitting on the back rank because all they're doing is moving their queen all over the board .

Like in this example , we moved here and we moved here and we moved here and now we have to move somewhere else .

Let's say they move here .

That's a fork .

And you can see already they're losing , right ?

That's the basic idea that you want to keep in the back of your mind against any type of early queen attack , not just the wayward queen attack .

Any time you see your opponent's queen come out really early .

You wanna think , how can I attack it with my four pieces ?

Now , let's go back for a second because this is a mistake that some people make , they play night to C six and then they think , OK , I'm gonna go follow Nelson's rule and attack the queen and they get checkmated .

So the second thing is while you are doing this , while you are developing your pieces and attacking the queen , make sure you're paying attention to basic threats and avoid those .

All right , just wanted to throw that out there .

So in this position , G six is actually the best move because we are not only gaining a tempo on the queen , but we are also blocking the queen from coming to F seven and saving the checkmate .

Usually they will go back and try it again .

You can simply play knight to F six , you block it off and you develop a piece at the same time .

And players who are really trying to be annoying will go over to B three lining up again on F seven and you have a couple of ways that you can approach this .

The easiest and simplest is just to play queen to E seven to defend it .

You're gonna put this bishop here , you're gonna castle and you have a really nice game .

Or if you want to get clever with them , you can play the move knight to D four actually allowing them to take that with check because now you play king to E seven and the queen is under attack .

And it's a , it's a little bit of a complicated tactic , but ultimately , you're gonna be trying to win their bishop .

So for example , if they just slide over here and put you in check , you're just gonna take their bishop because it's no longer defended .

And so if they want to hold on to that bishop , they have to go queen to C four .

And now you can play the move B five and they really don't have any good options anymore .

They can't keep the queen along that diagonal because you've got all of these squares covered .

They have to move somewhere and then you simply take their bishop .

All right .

So that's the best way to respond to the Wayward queen attack , in my opinion .

However , there's another concept that we need to talk about when you are developing your pieces and attacking the queen and gaining tempos .

Sometimes it is actually OK if you lose pawns in the process .

See , a lot of the times when people bring out their queen early , they're attacking your pawns , they're trying to capture your pawns with their queen .

And most of the time you can let that happen and you're still gonna be in a better position .

Let me give you a really good example of this .

You can play the move here at night to F six .

This is known as the kitty counterattack .

I have no idea why it's called that .

But essentially , you're going for the principle that I mentioned at developing a piece .

Attacking the queen , you allow them to take this , you play bishop to E seven .

And regardless of what they do , most people will play D three here .

Um You're gonna bring out another piece and again , we're developing and attacking the queen and most people will go back to G three here , 12 , we already have three pieces out and look at White's army , everybody is on the back .

You've got a couple of good moves here .

But I really like the move knight to D four threatening the fork on the king and the rook and white doesn't have a good way to prevent that .

If they play knight to a three , you can actually just take that and then your knight can come in here and you have a fork .

So that's pretty cool .

And the other way they could defend this would be something like king to D one .

In which case we're simply going to play D five and notice 123 .

We're ready to get this bishop out .

But there is a pawn over here that white can capture .

Remember how I said , we can give away those pawns as long as we're gaining tempo on the queen with our pieces .

Here's a good example , Rook to G eight .

Now we have another piece that's into the attack .

1234 .

This guy is pretty much about to be into the five pieces and again , look at white's army .

This is not how you want to play good chess if you're playing as white , OK , they have to move their queen probably to here you've got all kinds of good moves in this position .

I would probably just simply take this trying to open up their king .

You're gonna bring this out really soon .

Let's just say they take you back .

You can , you can take it , you can go bishop check .

Uh You can , I mean , there's so many good moves .

I it's minus 10 , minus 10 according to Stockfish , black is completely winning and we're only on move .

Move nine .

OK ?

So all of this happened because white was simply gobbling up these pawns and moving the queen all over the board and you were developing your pieces as quickly as possible .

If you follow that principle of developing those pieces , even if you're losing pawns , I can guarantee you , you're going to get into a great position .

Now , there is going to be a moment in the game if you follow this train of thought where at some point you're gonna have to see a little tactic , right ?

Like right here , you would have to be able to see that .

Oh I can trade that off and then I can come in for the fork , right ?

So you're gonna need to work on your basic tactics to be able to see that kind of stuff .

But ultimately , this is the strategy that you want to employ .

And if you do that , you're gonna be winning most of your games when people bring out their queens early .

Now , the next thing I wanna mention , I've kind of already touched on , but let's talk about the G and the B ponds for a second .

A lot of times when people are bringing out their queens and they're moving them all around , they end up on a square that's attacking your G or your B pond .

And if you're doing what I'm telling you and developing your pieces quickly like we did in this example , you might find yourself uh not having that pawn defended .

Now , usually , what I like to do is not even worry about it and let them take the pawn .

So like in this example , if white takes that , I don't care because I'm gonna play the rook over the knight is in a nice position to defend it .

We gain another tempo on the queen and then once it moves , we can follow through with our attack .

In this case , it was here and we're gonna be in a great position .

There's one warning that I have for you and that's make sure that your knight is defended by something .

In this case , it's defended by the bishop , which allows me to do this .

Even if the bishop wasn't there , it would be defended by the queen which allows me to do this .

If that was not the case you would have to be careful .

So let me show you another example .

So here's another position where white's been kind of doing some similar stuff , moving their queen around a bunch , moving some ponds .

And we are contemplating bringing out our bishop because we're trying to develop .

We're thinking that here looks like a good square because it's lined up on the queen .

It would leave this pawn undefended .

But Nelson told us to do that and not worry about it .

So we played bishop to E six .

This is where you have to be a little careful because now when the queen comes down , your night is under attack .

So if you try to play Rook to B eight to do the same thing , you're gonna lose a piece and now you're actually losing the game .

So you do wanna watch out for that .

A simple way to do that is just to make sure that this guy is defended first .

So one way to do that would be maybe queen to D six is a move .

And then let's just say something like this .

Now you can play bishop E six because if this happens , now you can play rook to B eight , you've got your knight defended and you're on the offensive and you're gonna keep attacking and go on with the game .

So just watch out for that .

But generally speaking , I really like to allow the queen to take those pawns slide .

The rook over , get another tempo .

You get a super aggressive position .

It's lots of fun and really , it's not good if your opponent is bringing out the queen and going for those pawns super early .

Hey , guys , before you go , I want to show you my super secret spreadsheet here .

Actually , it's not really a secret .

It's just my spreadsheet of all different chess skills starting from beginner , going to grand master .

You can notice after you learn the rules of the game and the point values of the pieces right here under very basic opening principles , we have don't bring out your queen early .

So if you had been going through this spreadsheet , you would know you shouldn't do that .

And now you know why , but there's 229 different chess skills on this spreadsheet .

You can see you can easily sort it by level of difficulty , the time required to learn that skill .

What rating range is it ?

So we can just just show the ones for under 1000 if that's where we are or once we're ready , we can jump over to 2400 really easy to get around .

You can keep track of what you've learned over here .

You've got this tab where you can , you know , select yes or no .

So I wanted to change this .

No , I'm still , I haven't learned that or it's in progress .

You can very easily change that if you want this spreadsheet I'm gonna put a link in the description below .

It's on sale on my course website .

Um And so really good resource if you're just not sure what you should learn next , it kind of helps you keep everything organized and keeps you on the right track .

Thank you guys for watching .

As always stay sharp , play smart and take care .