Attack and Defense In Chess - Part One

By Grandmaster Alex Yermolinsky

Attacks and Defenses

The Basics

While checkmating the king is the ultimate goal in chess, it is hard to accomplish this unless one obtains a material advantage. Even a little extra pawn can make a big difference when it’s promoted to a queen. Check out how to checkmate the king with only a king and queen by clicking here!

First we need to study how a material advantage is obtained. It seems simple: we capture the opponent’s pieces without losing our own. The trick however, is how to get this done safely. Let's start from the beginning...

Every time one of our pieces can take an enemy piece or pawn, we talk about an attack. When the opponent’s piece (pawn) isn’t defended by one of their own pieces, it’s considered unprotected or loose, and it will be captured on the next move by one of our pieces. In this case our attack becomes a threat!

 

 

Not every attack is a threat. Say, our queen attacks a pawn but the pawn is defended. That would mean that if we are to take it, then the opponent is going to take back. As a result, we would be giving away the queen (9 points) to get a pawn (1 point) – clearly, this is not a good business transaction .

 

 

 

Anticipating your opponent’s possible captures, with the ability to recapture with one of your pieces is called defending. All good players have the ability to keep their pawns and pieces protected.

Threats are also created when we use a piece of a smaller value to attack something of higher value. When we use a knight to attack the queen, do we really care if the queen is defended by one of the opponent's pieces? Of course not, because we would be winning a queen (9 points) for a knight (3 points) – a 6 point gain. The following example shows White making a big mistake by leaving his bishop under attack.

It is clear that one must count the value of the pieces involved in the capture/recapture process to figure out if it’s good to make the capture or not.

If we were to capture our opponent's rook with our rook and he recaptures back, then no one wins or loses a rook – we have made a trade or exchange of the rooks.

 

 

 

In this position Black has to make sure he doesn't lose his rook for nothing. There are many ways to do it: bring the king up to defend it (Kd7, Ke7 or Kf7), move the rook to a protected square (Re7 or Re5), or simply take the white rook (Rxe3) - in all cases the rooks will be traded, and black will have defended his rook.

I hope you enjoyed Part One of our article series on" Attack and Defense in Chess". Click here for Part Two!