How to Win at Checkers

Compulsory capture changes everything

Almost every beginner learns the rules of checkers in two minutes and then plays it as a game of grabbing pieces. The move from beginner to competent happens the moment you realise that because your opponent must capture, you get to decide what they do.

Place a piece where it can be jumped and your opponent has no choice: they must take it. If you have arranged the position so that taking it moves their piece somewhere disastrous — into a double jump, away from a key square, into a position where it blocks their own men — then you have effectively played their move for them. This is called a shot, and it is the central tactical idea of the game.

The simplest example is the two-for-one. You offer a piece; they are obliged to jump; their jumping piece lands where your next piece can jump two of theirs. You gave up one and took two. Beginners see the offer and think you blundered. Strong players see the offer and count the sequence, because the compulsion means there is nothing to guess about — you can calculate the whole thing exactly.

The checkers game highlights every legal move, and you will notice that when a capture exists nothing else is offered. That is the rule doing its work, and learning to exploit it deliberately is the fastest way to improve.

The race for the first king

A king moves and captures in all four directions instead of two. It is not a small upgrade — it roughly doubles what a piece can do, and in the endgame a lone king can dominate several ordinary men. Whoever crowns first usually wins, and much of the middlegame is really a race for that first crown.

This has a direct strategic consequence that beginners get backwards: your back row is not just where your pieces started, it is a wall. Every man you leave on your own back row denies your opponent a crowning square. Advance all of them early and you have opened the door for their first king.

The usual advice is to hold the two squares that are hardest for an opponent to attack for as long as you reasonably can, and to advance the rest. Holding the entire back row forever is too passive — those pieces do nothing else — but emptying it is worse. The judgement of when to release those defenders is one of the real skills of the game.

Centre, edges and the value of a square

Not all squares are equal. A piece in the centre of the board typically has four diagonal neighbours it could interact with; a piece against the side wall has two. That difference compounds across a whole game.

The edge deserves a closer look, because it is genuinely double-edged. A piece on the side file cannot be captured from the outside, since there is no square there to jump from. That makes edge pieces safe, and beginners often park pieces there feeling clever. The cost is that the same piece now has half the options, and a game played on the edges concedes the middle to the opponent.

A useful practical rule: use the edge as shelter, not as a home. Moving to the side to escape a threat is fine; building your position there is not.

When to trade

Exchanging pieces evenly seems neutral. It is not — it always favours somebody, and knowing who is a large part of playing well.

Trade when you are ahead in material. If you have ten pieces to their eight, every even trade increases your proportional advantage. Nine to seven is a bigger edge than ten to eight, and five to three is overwhelming. Simplification converts a small lead into a winning one.

Avoid trades when you are behind. Keeping pieces on the board keeps the position complicated, and complications are where your opponent might err. A player down two pieces who trades into a simple endgame has simply resigned slowly.

Trade to break a blockade. If your pieces are jammed and have few moves, an exchange opens lines. Mobility is a real asset in checkers — a player who runs out of safe moves must eventually play a losing one, which is the essence of the endgame.

Tempo and the squeeze

Because there is no passing, you must move every turn even when every move damages you. Skilled players exploit this directly: the goal in a tight position is not always to capture but to run your opponent out of good moves.

This is why mobility matters so much. Count not just pieces but available moves. A position with eight pieces and three legal moves is often worse than one with six pieces and ten, because the constrained player will shortly be forced to walk into something.

Beginners tend to advance in a solid wall, which feels safe and is actually the most common route to being squeezed — a wall has very few moves that do not break it. Leaving gaps, keeping pieces able to move without commitment, is what preserves flexibility. Watch for the moment your opponent's only legal moves are ones that lose material; engineering that moment is a win as clean as any capture.

Endgames worth knowing

Checkers endgames are sharply defined, and a handful of patterns settle a large share of games.

Two kings versus one. This is a straightforward win with correct technique: drive the lone king toward a corner using both of yours, taking away squares rather than chasing. Chasing a king around the open board achieves nothing, which is exactly why the forty-move draw rule exists.

The double corner. The two-square corner is the best place to defend, because a king there has more escape options than anywhere else on the board. A defender heading for the double corner can often hold a draw that looks lost; an attacker should cut off that route early.

King against man. A king beats a lone man almost always, because the man can only move one direction and eventually runs out of board. The exception is when the man is close to crowning — then it becomes a race, and counting the moves precisely matters more than anything positional.

The opposition. Just as in chess endgames, whose turn it is can decide an otherwise identical position. When two kings face each other along a diagonal, the player forced to move first is usually the one who must give ground. Learning to count squares so you arrive with the right parity is a genuinely advanced skill and a large step up in strength.

Openings, without memorising anything

Serious checkers has a deep opening theory — tournament play often uses randomly drawn opening moves precisely because the best lines were becoming too well known. None of that is necessary to play well socially, and memorising sequences is a poor use of a beginner's time. What matters is a handful of principles that generate good moves on their own.

Move toward the centre. Central advances contest more squares and keep more options open than edge advances. If you are unsure, the more central of two candidate moves is usually right.

Develop several pieces, not one. Pushing a single piece deep into enemy territory leaves it unsupported and usually loses it. Advance a group so that pieces defend one another.

Keep your back row intact early. There is no hurry to advance the defenders, and every one you move is a crowning square you have given away.

Do not chase material in the opening. An early capture that drags your piece out of position is often worse than no capture at all, and because captures are compulsory your opponent may well have offered it deliberately.

Variants worth knowing about

What most English speakers call checkers is one of many regional games. International draughts is played on a 10×10 board with twenty pieces a side, and men may capture backwards — a change that makes the game dramatically more tactical. Its kings are "flying kings" that move any distance along a diagonal, closer to a bishop than to the short-range king of the English game.

Russian draughts sits between the two: an 8×8 board with flying kings and backwards capture for men, plus the rule that a man crowning mid-jump continues immediately as a king. Brazilian draughts uses international rules on an 8×8 board. There are dozens more.

The reason this matters for a beginner is that a good deal of online advice is written for a different variant than the one you are playing. Advice about capturing backwards with ordinary men, or about kings sliding the length of the board, does not apply to English draughts — and the strategic conclusions that follow from those rules do not transfer either.

A game that computers actually solved

Checkers has an unusual place in computing history. In 2007, after roughly eighteen years of computation, Jonathan Schaeffer's team at the University of Alberta announced that the game was weakly solved: with perfect play from both sides, checkers is a draw. Their program, Chinook, had already become the first program to win a world championship title against humans.

The scale is worth appreciating. Checkers has roughly 5×10²⁰ legal positions — vastly fewer than chess, but still an enormous number, and the proof required both massive endgame databases and clever search to link them to the opening. It remains one of the largest games ever solved.

None of this makes playing pointless. A perfect draw requires perfect play, and no human plays perfectly. Every human game is decided by mistakes, which means the practical skills — spotting shots, holding the back row, judging trades — remain exactly as valuable as they ever were.

There is a nice parallel with how a computer opponent is built. The engine behind this game searches ahead a fixed number of moves, scores the resulting positions by material and placement, and assumes both sides play their best available option — the alpha-beta search that has underpinned game AI since the 1950s. The difficulty setting simply changes how far ahead it looks: one move on Easy, six on Hard. That is why Hard punishes loose play so reliably. It is not smarter, it just sees further.

Practical habits that win games

Before every move, check what your opponent must take. Because captures are compulsory, look for what you are forcing them into — and equally, whether the move you want to play offers them a shot. Most beginner losses are unnoticed two-for-ones.

Count the whole sequence, not the first jump. When a capture is available, follow the chain: what does their reply capture, and what does that let you take? Because everything is forced, these sequences can be calculated exactly rather than guessed.

Advance in support. A piece that can be protected — where recapturing is possible if it is taken — is far safer than a lone runner. Two men moving together are worth more than two men moving separately.

Do not rush the crown. Sprinting a single piece toward the far row usually loses it. Kings are won by winning the position, not by racing.

Try these against the computer in the checkers game — start on Easy to practise spotting shots, then move to Hard, which searches six plies ahead and will punish a loose piece immediately. If you want a different kind of board-game thinking, Chess rewards long-term planning and Connect Four is the fastest way to practise seeing threats.