check to your majesty
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- Avoid mistakes.
- Do not make the opening moves automatically and without reflection.
- Do not seek to memorise variations, try to understand them.
- Do not believe all that you are told. Examine, verify, use your reason.
- In war, topography dictates operations.
- Do not abandon the centre to your adversary.
- Do not give up open lines, seize them and hold them.
- Do not create weak points in your game for your enemy to seize.
- Do not lose time.
- Unless you analyse the position, you will achieve nothing.
- Do not leave any piece where it has no range of action or is out of touch with your other pieces.
- Do not play too quickly.
- It is not a move, even the best move, that you must seek, but a realisable plan.
- Do not despise the small details; it is often in them that the idea of the position will be found.
- Do not think too soon about what you opponent can do; first get clear what you want to do.
- Do not lose confidence in your judgment.
- Never lose sight of your general idea, however thick the fight.
- Do not modify your plan.
- Do not be content with attacking an existing weakness; always seek to create others.
- Do not get careless when, after general exchanges, the end game is reached.
- Haste, the great enemy.
- Do not relax in the hour of victory.
- Do not entangle yourself in a maze of calculations.
- Never omit to blockade an enemy passed Pawn.
- Do not leave your pieces in bad positions.
-How Not to Play Chess by Eugene A. Znosko-Borovsky, 1949
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