Recognizing Weakness
For your moves to be efficient in chess, you should know certain knowledge of the game. Other than knowing the rules, and basic movements of the pieces, you should also know how to determine whether a square is weak or not.
Why Know The Strength?
Most amateurs mistake in chess is that they usually play for the win, mate, material or even a weak pawn creation. However, what most players do not recognize is the importance of squares. Getting hold of squares are just as vital as capturing pawns, getting a development lead or obtaining a good minor piece.
Getting to know weak and strong squares is part of getting to know the elements of the chess strategy. Each of all 64 squares on your chessboard are important. However, there are instances that some squares become more favorable than others due to certain circumstances.
Pawns And Squares
To comprehend pawn structure, you must be aware of strong and weak squares. The said strong squares would be those that your pieces have control of, consequently the weak squares for you would be those that your opponent’s have control of. You should also keep in mind that those strong squares of yours are consequently the weak squares of your opponent and vice versa.
More than other types of chess pieces, pawns, are the ones that have integrated strong and weak squares. To start off, its strong squares are those two squares diagonally positioned from it, which are the ones where it could capture your opponent’s pieces. On the other hand, your pawns weak square would be the one that is placed in front of it. This is considered to be weak since once it is occupied by another piece, especially if a piece of your opponent, then your pawn couldn’t advance or make a move, unless it has an opponent piece to capture on either its diagonal paths.
Exploiting Weaknesses
The game also requires that you look out for weaknesses in your opponent’s positions at the same time keeping yourself from being in a weak position. As usual, your game play should remain to be a balance of attacking your opponent and defending your troops. A weakness is merely a flaw on a position that you could exploit. Such weaknesses could be anything from overworked pieces, open lines to poor piece placements. However, it would still highly depend on the stage of game you are in for you to see the varied weaknesses your opponent has.
Achieving Balance
Being able to balance such weaknesses and playing a certain weakness in opposition to another is considered to be the heart of chess. Thus, this would mean that you might rather want to sacrifice your game tempo in order to make a weakness out of your rivals castled king or you might want to make an attack on the king of your opponent and trade pieces so that you could gain advantage that you could use in the endgame.
It’s said that you would need to find at least 2 weaknesses for you to win your chess game. The main idea behind that claim is that when you attack the weakness of your opponent, he/she would definitely defend that weakness then he/she would create another weakness somewhere else on the board. Thus, as your game progresses it’s important for you to be able to point out the weaknesses which your opponent has and at the same time not creating too much of your very own weaknesses.
Common Weaknesses
One common weakness which you would encounter would be an overextended attack of your opponent. If be it the case that your opponent tends to focus too much on giving attention to only one area of your defense yet you’re still able to keep your defenses up, try checking out your opponents pieces, since for sure, he/she would have left a lot of weaknesses, which you could exploit.
Generally, whites weak squares could often be found on the 3rd and 4th ranks. On the other hand, black’s weaknesses could be usually found on the 6th and 5th ranks. Additionally, weak squares could usually raise the worth of the piece that would be occupying it. This kind of situation is most especially true for knights that need advanced support points in order to be efficient.
