* Help your pieces so they can help you.
* Every move you make should strengthen your position in some way.
* Chess is very much a team game. Get your pieces to work together.
* Develop the pieces as quickly as possible to best possible squares for them. Sometimes, the best square for a piece is an unusual one.
* Create a pawn set-up which will allow your pieces the optimum freedom and stability, while denying your opponent similar scope.
* Only those pawn moves that are essential to the development of pieces should be made.
* Games are often won by simply taking space and restricting the opponent's options.
* Penetrate into the enemy position. A space advantage means little if there is no way to penetrate into the enemy position.
* Don't move a piece you have to go back with at once to the same square it came from. You only lose a move and gains nothing.
If you play Nf3-g5 and black play the pawn move h7-h6, and your only good move then is to play Ng5-f3, you have lost a move. So you have to motivate better why you should play Nf3-g5 at all.
There are many master games where Nf3-g5 was a good move. For example:
1) It makes it possible to play pawn move f2-f4.
2) It threatens to win a pawn, a piece or playing mate.
3) It provokes the opponent to weaken the pawn position on the kingside.
4) The knight on g5 has the intention to move to a better square at e4 or h3.
5) Another possibility seen in master games for white is to not move away the knight from g5 after a black h7-h6. Instead white plays the pawn move h2-h4 (answering h6xg5 with h4xg5), or plays the pawn move f2-f4 (answering h6xg5 with f4xg5), sacrificing the knight on g5 for a strong attack on the kingside.
* A good help to learn playing good opening moves is to use for example Chessgames.com: www.chessgames.com
You will find good information at Chessgames.com about openings and many instructive master games, showing you how to play good developing moves in the opening and how to play good in the rest of your games.
The link to the Opening Explorer at Chessgames.com is: www.chessgames.com/perl/explorer
* Always ask yourself what your opponent threatens with his moves.
* Laziness and impatience is no good combination if you want to become good in chess.
If you ever are going to be good in chess you have to study chess, not only playing chess games. Read chess books. Read at least two or three pages every week. If you do that you will after some years have read many chess books and improved your knowledge how to play good chess.
Chatting with online chess players, that still have a rating around 1200-1500 in strength, answer that they do not read chess books to improve. They just play chess games. They say they are too lazy and too impatience to study chess.
I hope they would use some of all their hundreds of hours playing online chess to also read chess books. Then they would beat higher rated players more than they do. Reaching a 2000 chess rating or higher is no utopia if you study chess.
I recommend you to begin with two chess books written by Jeremy Silman:
The Amateur's Mind
The Reassess Your Chess Workbook
