《chess-lesson-3》.pdf

International Chess School: KING’S SAFETY Final Theory On our way to evaluating a position, a very important element to consider is the safety of the king. We hope you have studied the assigned annotated games and other theoretical lessons with examples. Now, it is time to conclude, add some extra observations, and give the final theory which will help you to make a faster and better assessment of the safety of the king and how it can be attacked or defended. First, we need to remember that here we do not discuss typical pawn structures (as King’s Indian Attack or Defense, positions with isolani pawns, English attack, Keres attack and other systems), but we consider general aspects and discuss positions that arise often in practice. We will discus the typical attacks on kings in more detail when we treat the first typical pawn structures, in a future ICS course. In addition, we do not consider kings castled on different sides as this is a different chapter of our course, and the essence of such positions is usually based on: “whoever starts the attack first, wins”. The most frequent case is when the kings are castled on the same side, and this is what we are interested at this moment (king’s safety as a criterion of positional evaluation). When you need to evaluate a position from a strategic point of view to decide about a move, the kings are usually castled on the same wing. For clearer explanations, we refer to the attacker as being White and the defender as being Black. Of course, the roles are simply reversed when Black attacks the white king’s position. PAWN STRUCTURES IN FRONT OF THE KING 1. Pawn structure: f7, g7, h7 FGHY This is the best pawn structure in front of the king. The only +k+( drawback is that the black king has no escape against a mate on the ba