The first lesson you must learn while on the road to improving your chess game is to get your priorities straight. The primary objective of the opening is the rapid deployment of your pieces to their optimal posts. You shouldn't put a piece on a good square, however, if that piece can be driven away easily by your opponent's pieces, so getting your pieces not only on good squares, but also on safe squares, is critical to your opening game.

The rapid mobilization of pieces is called development. Development isn't considered complete until the knights, bishops, queens, and rooks are moved off their original squares. Normally, getting the knights, bishops, and queen off the back rank is important as well. Rooks may be effective in fighting from their starting rank, but the other pieces usually increase in power only as they move toward the center.

Centralization of your pieces are critical objectives in a chess game. The pieces generally increase in power as they're centralized. In the opening phase, you want to maximize the power of the pieces in a minimal amount of time. Moving one piece three times to position it on the best square doesn't help much if, in the meantime, your other pieces languish on their original squares. So the key is focusing on not just one piece, but them all.

Just as important as developing quickly is preventing your opponent's development. Some otherwise strange-looking moves can be explained only in this way. If you waste two moves to force your opponent to waste three, well, those moves weren't wasted after all!