Knight outposts

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When looking at openings I often ask players to perform the following exercise:

 

[EXERCISE:]

 On a bare chessboard, put a knight on a1. How many squares can it move to? Just two. On b1, three. On c1, four. On c2, six. On c3, eight. From this you can see that moving from b1 to c3 in the opening makes the knight more than twice as powerful.

Now, this is part of the argument about control of the centre, and helps explain why development towards the centre is so important. But it is particularly true of knights, because their step is so small. A bishop developed in fianchetto on b2 or g2 can extend its reach to the other side of the board, but a knight on b2 can hardly make it to the half-way line. Knights become much stronger by being moved into the centre, but as a rule are vulnerable to being swapped off or nudged by pawns. An outpost is a square which a knight can occupy , which is either immune from attack (like d5 in the lower diagram) or the opponent would get into other sorts of trouble by getting rid of it (like in the Tal game overleaf). So, one of the key strategical ideas in chess is the knight outpost.

David Norwood describes an exercise given to players in the old USSR where they were given the position in the diagram

and asked:

[EXERCISE:]

 remove pairs of pieces of equal value to White’s advantage.

The solution they were looking for was to remove all the Qs,Rs, and everything else apart from the Kings, one White knight and the Black B on f8. Then White’s knight could go to d5, dominating the board, while Black’s poor bishop couldn’t ever swap it off. It would be a pretty miserable bishop anyhow, which is our next idea – the bad bishop. But this exercise also starts to show you how to plan a game of chess based on the pawn structure: this ‘remove pairs of pieces’ exercise is what you can try and do by exchanging pieces, and this is pretty well what Smyslov does in the illustrative game.

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