How not to play chess

 While it is certainly harder to play good chess than bad chess, the reasons for being bad at chess do deserve some study. I did see a quote (allegedly from Lasker), about not understanding how people could be bad at chess, but maybe I imagined it.

There is a book called "How Not To Play Chess" by Zonosko-Borovsky, although his first rule is the rather broad "Avoid Mistakes". He does break it down a little, but if I was explaining this concept, I would at least have the following

• Don't get checkmated
• Don't lose your queen
• Don't lose other pieces
• Don't lose pawns
• Don't try and win by moving the same piece over and over

After that I would probably line up with what Zonosko-Borovsky said, such as "Don't make automatic replies", "Don't abandon the centre", "Don't surrender open files"

But in reality, for new players, it is the first set of rules that you need to focus on. otherwise the rest of the rules won't matter