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Anatoli Karpov – the master of restriction RESTRICTION Restricting your opponent’s pieces is just as important as activating your own. The difference is that there are much less [...]

PIECE ACTIVITY Piece activity is at the heart of chess strategy. It is connected with everything else. If you want to give an early check mate, you need active pieces. If you want to win [...]

    PAWN BREAKS Let’s first define what a pawn break is. If you move a pawn in a way that it could be taken by an enemy pawn and hence you would be able to take this pawn next move, we [...]

  PAWN MAJORITIES Positions with mutual pawn majorities are generally more demanding than others, due to the inherent imbalances. Often, there are at least four positional themes to pay [...]

  SPACE Many authors consider space as an independent value category. That is okay with me, as there are different ways for constructing a taxonomy. In my worldview however, there are only 4 [...]

  WEAK SQUARES The topic of “weak squares” is at least as important as the question of “weak pawns”. There are simply more of them on average, mainly because there are more squares on the [...]

  WEAK PAWNS The pawn structure is probably the most important characteristic of a position. Not only is it important by itself, it is also strongly connected with king safety and piece [...]

    THE CCT-RULE Success in chess depends heavily on the thought processes employed during the game. The aim is to assess the position in terms of relevant characteristics, values, [...]