Ruy Lopez (Spanish Game)

Okay, So today, I am going to go over the Ruy Lopez for white. This opening has the highest win percentage from white so it is good to know... If you play this be aware that black has two traps that you can fall into. These are the fishing pole and the mortimer trap. I will go over these as well. So lets look at the Ruy in general.

They Ruy Lopez starts out like this:

1. e4 e5
2. Nf3 Nc6
3. Bb5 (?)

Depending on what the question mark is, you can decide what you want to do. If you are playing black I reccomend Nf3 which allows for multiple traps, but the most popular move is a6, kicking the bishop. The first move we will look at is a6. So the move order is:

1. e4 e5
2. Nf3 Nc6
3. Bb5 a6

Now from here the only logical move is Ba4 because Bc4 you could have done before that. You can also take the knight. I like to take the knight but remember that if they take the knight with the queen pawn then you can't capture the pawn on a5 or Qa4! happens. This is a really bad position for white. Lets continue with what I was saying about Ba4 though:

1. e4 e5
2. Nf3 Nc6
3. Bb5 a6
4. Ba4

from here, black will either play b5 kicking the bishop once again, but then you can play Bb3. If your opponent wants to be a "prick" then he will play a5 and threaten a4 which would be trapping your bishop, but then you can either play a4 or a3 and give your bishop a square to hide and stop the threat. Note that if your opponent does this, this is good for you because your opponents queenside fell apart for no reason.

Here is the move order if that happened that I would play:

1. e4    e5
2. Nf3 Nc6
3. Bb5 a6
4. Ba4 b5
5. Bb3 a5
6. a3    b4
7. Ba2 ......

White is clearly winning in this position. Black has nothing for his bad queenside except an open rook which will still take a while to develop and it won't be good to have the rook in the game right now anyway.

The other thing that I like to do is just take the knight. This is very efficient if you can make it to the endgame (When their is one or no minor/ major pieces left) and pawns. Double pawns will then suck. I love tactics and positional games so this is my favorite. I can't really explain how to play it because it doesn't have a "main" line, it is just your playing style that you have to use.

The last thing that you have to know is how to play the Nf6 variant of this opening.

It looks like this:

1. e4 e5
2. Nf3 Nc6
3. Bb5 Nf6

From here you should castle!! if the knight takes the pawn on e4 then you can play Re1! winning the pawn back and making black waste a move with his knight. Wasting your opponents move is called a tempo. You want to gain a lot of tempos and not have to deal with your opponent getting them.

Usually your opponent won't take the pawn, he will usually continue with a6 and then you just get to play naturally... I reccomend taking the knight here. If your opponent wants to play and try to trick you, then he will play Ng4: This is called the fishing pole trap. He is trying to bait you into playing h3 which would allow for the brilliant move h5. From there, if you capture the knight, then the pxg4. and then when your knight moves he has Qh4 which forces mate. So never fall for this. Here is the notation:

1. e4 e5
2. Nf3 Nc6
3. Bb5 Nf3
4. Castle Ng4
5. h3       h5
6. hxg4   hxg4
7. Nh2   Qh4
White either resigns or plays the move f3 which is easily countered with the simple g3. Now white has no escape.
8. f3 g3
9. White is mated no matter what.

So that is basically the Ruy Lopez for you... I hope I helped and maybe you will use this in one of your games.