Strategic Implications.

Your first question before making almost any move is whether there is a tactical opportunity for you on the board. If there isn't—as rou- tinely will be true—then your choice of move will be determined by strategic considera- tions: attempts to secure positional advantages that may ripen into tactical opportunities. One goal of strategic play is to create the types of positions where tactics, such as the double attacks we have studied, become possible. It is not the purpose of this site to advise you on effective strategy in any depth, but here are a

few elementary points on the subject, particu- larly as it relates to the knight.

A couple of general things first. It often has been observed that good positional play leads naturally—perhaps even mysteriously—to chances for tactical wizardry. Why? The rea- sons have to do with what good positional play accomplishes. The most important pur- pose of it is to expand the power and mobility of your pieces—often the same thing, because the power of a piece largely is a function of how many squares it attacks, which in turn will depend on its mobility. A rook on an open file—i.e., a file containing no pawns—is very mobile and for that reason very power- ful. Likewise a bishop on an open diagonal. So when you look at a piece and assess the quality of its position, consider how many squares it controls. A fully deployed army of pieces will attack a large share of the squares on the board, especially including squares in your opponent’s half of the board, many of them two or three times. A second purpose of positional play, of course, is the converse: limiting the power and mobility of your op- ponent’s pieces. The fewer the squares he attacks, the greater your ability to put your own pieces there.

These principles relate to tactics in obvious ways. If your pieces have lots of room to move and attack lots of squares, that means they can range more boldly into parts of the board where they can cause trouble to your opponent; it also means you are more likely to be able to coordinate them, bringing two or three or four pieces to bear on a sector in ways that permit a combination: perhaps sac- rificing one, pinning with the other, and then capturing or forking with the third. Note that an individual piece does not threaten much when it ranges into enemy territory by itself; as we have seen many times, a knight usually needs help from other pieces to set up a good fork. Meanwhile if your opponent’s pieces are constricted or blocked in their movements, this does more than prevent them from caus- ing you trouble. It makes them prey to tactical strikes, because they give him fewer good options in responding to checks, captures, and threats that you make.

So when you aren’t playing tactics, think about these two considerations: how you can place your pieces to enlarge the amount of territory (“space”) they attack and control; and how you can place your pieces and pawns to confine your opponent’s army. This partly is a matter of simple gestures like moving your rooks onto open files, getting your knights and bishops off the back rank and out where they can exert pressure down the board, and keeping a pawn or two in the cen- ter so that your opponent can’t plant pieces there and so that your pieces there are pro- tected. It’s also a matter of subtler things: exchanging pawns where the exchange will create an open or half-open file for your rook (but perhaps not if it creates such files for his rook); placing your pawns (and keeping his pawns) on squares that block the paths of his bishops; and thinking about how pawn moves and exchanges affect the lines open to other pieces on both sides. These are general ideas to consider when you are picking a move without any immediate tactical purpose. Against this backdrop consider the knight in particular. The knight doesn't need open lines because it jumps rather than slides. But it still needs help from your pawns to be effective. The first thing to grasp is that the knight’s prospects for creating mischief tend to in- crease as it moves up the board. A White knight on f3 early in the game serves mostly a defensive purpose, and a valuable one (though of course even this knight has offensive po- tential, as we occasionally have seen); the same knight on, say, d4, d5, or d6 becomes a terrible offensive threat. On d6 it strikes out at eight squares, including six in your oppo- nent’s half of the board; from any of the squares just listed the knight can attack the opponent’s back rank, and often his king, in one move. (More than 90% of the knight forks we have considered involved the king as one of the two targets.) So an important gen- eral strategic aim is to get one of your knights planted on a square on your fourth rank or beyond. An especially good place to plant a knight is on a square near the center, since from there it can make threats and influence play in all sectors of the board. This is why chess books often speak of the importance of

controlling the center, and of the battles that players wage to keep a pawn on the central squares and to keep enemy pawns away from there. The point is not necessarily that pawns in the center themselves threaten anything; it is that the pawns control the squares that they can attack. When you have a pawn on e4 it controls not e4 but d5 and f5. Enemy pieces are unable to move to those squares; your pieces can. Having good central squares on which you can plant your pieces is important. That is where they are most powerful.

Dg093: White to move

Dg093: The key word is “plant.” It’s not much use to move your knight to a central square only to have it chased away by a pawn. You have to create a hospitable square - an “outpost square”—for your knight. A good outpost (d5 in the diagram) is a square where the knight cannot be harassed by pawns, be- cause the enemy pawns on either side of its file are gone, are blocked, or have advanced up to your knight’s rank or beyond it. Ideally the well-posted knight also is protected by one of your own pawns; that will prevent it from being chased away by one of your op- ponent’s rooks or his queen. The remaining point is to make sure the knight is not threat- ened by one of your opponent’s bishops or knights. The White knight in the diagram has all of the good properties just described. It is planted in the center of the board on d5, where it has two ways to check the Black king. So long as the knight stays where it is it will be a constant forking threat, exerting a great influence over everything else that hap- pens in the game. Notice the role of the pawns here: White controls the knight’s square with the pawn on e4; Black has no pawn that can chase the knight away—and also no knight,

and no light-squared bishop. As a result, the knight probably will be impossible for Black to dislodge without a sacrifice. White had to fight to create this position; for an account of the battle, see Weeramantry’s first-rate book Best Lessons of a Chess Coach.

The conditions of a good outpost square may seem numerous, but creating them is a suit- able task to keep you busy when you aren’t playing a tactic. Some of them take care of themselves; others require work. Realize, first, that every time you move a pawn for- ward you weaken the squares it used to pro- tect. If the pawns on either side of a square have moved forward or are off the board, the square becomes a hole where the other player eventually can put his pieces, comfortable in the knowledge that no pawn will be able to chase them away. It is common for such holes to be created inadvertently as each side ad- vances and exchanges pawns. (In the diagram here, Black allowed a hole to be created on d5 by moving his e-pawn to e5 and by allowing his c-pawn to be removed.) This is a critical consideration to bear in mind both offensively and defensively. From an offensive stand- point, realize that the most important conse- quence of an exchange of pawns (or of any sequence) sometimes can be to foul up your opponent's pawn structure and leave holes behind. On the defensive side, think carefully about whether your pawn moves or exchanges will result in holes that create outpost squares for your opponent’s knights and other pieces; place your pawns so that they guard (rather than occupy) the attractive squares where his knights might like to perch. A few pawns well-placed in this way can neutralize a knight quite thoroughly.

As for your opponent’s bishops, if one of them is off the board, then squares of the color the missing bishop used to patrol are natural candidates for outposts. Likewise, if you see a promising outpost square it is worth hunting down and exchanging away the en- emy bishop that travels on squares of that color. If you then have to move a knight three times to get it onto a good outpost square, it may well be worth it. A knight often will not be a big factor in a game—and will not be

able to make the types of moves seen in this chapter—unless it finds a suitable outpost; once it does find an outpost, it may dominate the rest of the action. Even if you cannot sat- isfy all of these criteria for an optimal outpost square, taking care of one or two of them— creating the characteristic pawn structure in particular—may create an outpost that is suit- able for quite a while. (If you can’t get rid of the bishop on the color of the outpost square, for example, it may nevertheless be out of position to do anything about your knight.) And naturally a safe outpost may be easier to create later in the game when there are fewer enemy pieces on the board.

2.1.13. Summary.

The natural tendency of the mind when look- ing at a chessboard, as elsewhere, is to jabber away with tangled thoughts. Effective chess requires a different style of thinking: system- atic, thorough, and aggressive. You want to ask the right questions before you decide what to do. There are, first, general questions that must be considered routinely. As the great Australian chess writer Cecil Purdy sug- gested, the most basic are “what does he threaten?” and “what is his reply if I make this move?” Also, and relatedly, “if I do this, will I leave anything unprotected?” and “does he have any checks that can cause me trou- ble?” There is no need to blunder away a piece by leaving it unguarded if you are care- ful to interrogate the board this way as a mat- ter of course.

The principles laid out in this chapter might likewise be summarized into a sort of check- list. The goal of studying patterns is to inter- nalize all this and think with your eyes, rather than in a verbal flow chart, but as you are getting started it helps to dwell on the ques- tions that are helpful to ask yourself, with or without words, before deciding what move to make.

With respect to knight forks, the important questions generally arise when you have a knight in the same vicinity as some of your

opponent’s pieces, and especially within strik- ing range of his king. Again, the order in which the questions are asked is not particu- larly important, and will depend on the salient features of the position that suggest them- selves to your eye; nevertheless, the ones most often important are these:

Do I have a potential fork? If so, Is the square that I need protected? If so, Is the protecting piece constrained? Is it pinned, can it be pinned, or would it be pinned after the sequence of moves I am con- sidering? Can the protecting piece be cap- tured, and then be replaced with a piece that is less effective? Can I capture something that the protecting piece guards, thus luring it away from the forking square? If there is no immediate way to do this, are there any se- quences of exchanges that would have this effect?

Can one of the pieces in the fork be captured and thus exchanged for a more suitable tar- get?

If I go ahead and deliver the fork and let my knight be captured, what then becomes possi- ble? What lines are opened, and what pins created? What checks could I then administer, and with what replies? Then what checks or forks would I have?

If I don’t have a potential fork, can my knight check the king? If so, can a valuable enemy piece be moved onto a square that would be forked by my check? If my knight can't give check, what checks with other pieces now are available to me? What are the responses re- quired by each of them? What checks could I then add, and with what responses? Do the positions resulting from any of these se- quences create chances for knight forks? Let this chapter change the way you think about checks and captures. Very often they are usefully given not for their own sake but because they require responses that change the board and may then create good opportu- nities for double attacks or other tactical

strikes. So when you imagine making a cap- ture, do not just ask whether your opponent can recapture and write off the idea if he can. Imagine what would be possible after your opponent recaptures that might not have been possible before. By the same token a check that easily can be evaded hardly is worthless for that reason; the point of a check com- monly is to force the king to move or to force other responses that eventually might make a fork or other tactic possible. This basic prin- ciple—viewing checks and captures as ways of changing the look of the board to create other opportunities, rather than as ends in themselves—is the essence of tactical think- ing.