What Did I Do?
What Have I Learned?
I read and learned about 2 articles written on course topics by Jeremy Silman, the first one was:
1. An initiative isn’t necessarily an attack. It just means that you are calling the shots and your opponent has to respond. Sometimes one side has a material advantage while the other has an initiative. The initiative might prove more valuable than your opponent’s material plus, but sometimes the side with the extra material might be able to end your initiative. That often means you’re toast since the initiative you had is gone while your opponent’s material advantage is still staring you right in the eye.
2. A similar case occurs when one side has a superior pawn structure (a static plus) while the opponent has an initiative (a dynamic plus). It’s anyone’s game, and the result often favors the player who is aware of this battle and makes use of his plus.
3. In other cases, you can transform your initiative (usually temporary) into a long-term, static advantage.
4. For example, if you have a clear advantage in development. Since your opponent will eventually catch up in development, you must...attack and try to drag him down right away or...make use of your development to gain some sort of long -erm plus like an extra pawn or a spatial advantage.
5. An initiative gives you an extra step in whatever position you have. However, one has to ask what the opponent has. If you have an initiative and your opponent doesn’t really have anything special, then you are in control of the game. Whether or not your control will bear fruit is another matter. In many cases, you’ll see one side with an initiative and another with various positional advantages or even extra material.Which one wins? That depends on the particular position.
6. It is also very common for the initiative to morph into something else. It could become a full-fledged attack, or the initiative might turn into some kind of static plus such as a better pawn structure, more space, or a superior minor piece.
Below is the 2nd article.
"Tales Of Bishop And Knights" (click the text to read the article)
The first thing people do is memorize the basic rules regarding the bishop vs. knight battle. Those are:
1. Bishops are usually superior in open positions (because diagonals are often wide open, and bishops are able to leap from one side of the board to another).
2. Knights are usually equal or superior to a bishop in a closed position (because the pawns block the diagonals). Also, knights are able to jump over pawns, while bishops hit a wall when a pawn is in front of it).
3. Knights are usually superior to a bishop if all the pawns are on one side of the board. Why? Because the bishops long-range powers are no longer important since the battle will occur on only one sector.
4. If a Knight has a central support point on the fourth, fifth, or sixth rank, the knight will usually be equal to or far superior to the enemy bishop.
5. In the Middlegame, the side with a Bishop wants to have the enemy pawns on the opposite color of the bishop since that allows the bishop to patrol the diagonal. The side with the knight wants to place some of his pawns on the same color of the enemy bishop since those pawns will block it.
6. Finally, in general two bishops vs. two knights heavily favors the bishops (unless it’s a very closed position), and a bishop and knight vs. two knights is usually also in favor of the bishop and knight since two knights have the same power, while the bishop and knight has both the knight’s power and the bishop’s.
Keep in mind that there are always many exceptions to the rules. So don’t blindly follow them without taking a good look at the position and making sure the rules apply in that particular situation.
Other than the bishop-vs.-knight rules above, we can say that rules for knights are quite clear, while rules for bishops are not as straightforward as one might think. Of course, if there’s a wide-open diagonal it might well be a good idea to grab it with your bishop. But what about if it’s a “road to nowhere?”
What this tells us is that placing a bishop on a long diagonal isn’t necessarily what you should be looking for. Instead, you want your bishop to place pressure on the enemy king or weak pawns, or use it to simply make certain squares unlivable for the enemy. To accomplish these things, the shorter diagonal is often the correct choice. Of course, a bishop isn’t forced to make use of one diagonal. Often the bishop hands pain to the opponent by using a few diagonals.
The simple fact of life on a chessboard is that any piece can dominate another piece. With bishops, you need to have faith that they will eventually come into their own. In fact, many battles are all about openings where one side gets a knight and the other a bishop. In those cases neither minor piece might seem better than the other, but it’s your responsibility to make them better than the other.
Other times nothing much is going on but you feel that, down the line, your bishops will blossom if you create the right kind of bishop-friendly-atmosphere.
As mentioned earlier, many openings create situations where one side has one or two bishops while the other has knights. It’s a never-ending battle, where the person with knights does his best to make them strong, while the other person will be doing everything possible to turn the board into a playground for bishops.
