Archive for April, 2007

Coordination

In unbalanced positions when one of the players has a Queen, simple evaluation by counting material is mostly useless. Factors that are more important are Queen’s activity and how well can other player coordinate his Rooks and/or pieces.

Chiburdanidze - Dudkova, USSR 1976

Chiburdanidze - Dudkova

Material units are giving slight advantage to White. On the other hand, Black has passed pawn threatening to promote soon and active King - something that would be counted as very important in dynamic evaluation. Some authors even tend to count active King in the endgame as 5 units, or equal to the Rook!

Still, White Rook and minor pieces are coordinating extremely well. Not only that this coordination is dramatically increasing their battle power, but follow-up will prove that seemingly active Black King and Queen and actually very clumsy.

Offtopic: Unrelated to this example, but it can be useful in different situations - Knight is King’s best defender when it comes to declining direct attacks. Nf1-Kg1 (or Nf8-Kg8) is strong resisting setup where Knight is controlling large number of important squares.

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