Chess

[Black Baron]

Moving the G and H pawns, is pretty much depending on a situation. Moving g pawn and placing the bishop there is a bunker. Beware! should your opponent play e5-e4 (if he is black) your bishop will suck.
To tell you the truth all the pawn moving pretty much depends on the opening. The "castling" depends also pretty much on the opening. If you castle to the opposite side than your enemy then it will be a very interesting game.
Remember-double pawns are a weakness, grabbing open lines/half open (when you have only 1 pawn on the line) with heavy pieces (rook and queen) is a must. Knights are better in a closed position and bishops in the open one. 2 bishops are better than a bishop and a knight (usually). If you have a bishop ending place your pawns on the opposite colour of your enemy bishop.

[Assassin]

So that's why I usually have more success with Knights than Bishops. My games usually turn out to be closed position games, where all of the diagonal lines are blocked off by pawns. =/

Black Baron, does that mean that it would better to just move the H-Pawn forward?

[ 05-27-2004, 08:23 AM: Message edited by: Assassin ]

[Gnarf]

Originally posted by Vaskez: Hmmm chess... an admirable thinking-man's game, but I'd rather leave the thinking to my work and not use my brain in my spare time

I'm sure everyone's noticed [img]smile.gif[/img]

Not that I tend to play any meself. I'm actually kinda afraid of it. Eventually you'll probably end up understadning the odd codey stuff they use when writing about games... "11...0-0 12.Bg5= h6?! Oh dear, now the pawn is free." is beyond geeky.

[Black Baron]

You can read the "in short" bit and skip the explanation if you like.

An extremely popular and useful thing is to play bishop g4 (for the white it will be bishop g5), thus creating a tie between knight and a queen, should knight go away, the queen will be lost. Should queen go away bishop will eat the knight, and you will end with unprotected king (if you castled there) and double pawns. More often than not it is a sure pass to loosing for the white.
In order to prevent it, either play: 1) pawn h3 (in some openings a liability. The black can sacrifice the bishop for 2 pawns after- queen c8, or d7 or e6, bishop eats h3, g2 eats h3, queen eats h3-->white is in trouble).
2) bishop e2 (in some openings a liability) and move the knight away, exchange the bishops and gg.
3)knight from the queens side to d2, move the queen, them move the tied knight at f3 to some other location.the plan sometimes is problematic.

Apart from the strategical reasons (the tie, or the opening requests )listed above i do not see any strategical reasons of playing h3. I showed you 2 substitutions if you do not want to play h3, in case yo have the tie. If the enemy is threatening to place another piece at g4, playing h3 needs to be considered.
Tactical reasons of course (winning material or f.e gaining a strong attack at the enemy king with king h1 and rook g1 afterwards) are different per game.


In short: Study openings. Without them it will be case per case desicions. read the explanations for general lines.

[Black Baron]

Actually the coding is easy.

k-king.
q-queen.
r-rook.
kn-knight.
b-bishop.
pawn-gets none.

- is moved to. You can write bg5 (bishop moves to g5) or you can write f.e. h4-g5 (piece from h4 goes to g5).
: is ate.
+ is check.
++ is checkmate.
! is strong move.
? is weak move.
!? is dubious.
0-0 is castling to kings side.
0-0-0 is castling to queens side.

The rest is comments.

[Assassin]

Knight is usually N. Know a good site that shows good, indepth analysis of most of the popular openings?

[ 05-27-2004, 04:37 PM: Message edited by: Assassin ]

[LennonCook]

Assasin, I know that I have never seen knight as any other than Kn... or KKn for the King's side knight, or QKn for the Queen's side knight. I've also seen P for pawn, and x for 'takes'. And when I first found a book that described the notation, the squares on the board were referenced by the pieces rather than as a standard grid reference. For example,
KKnP - KKn4
Would mean that the pawn in front of the King's side knight moves forward two spaces. And I must say I've never seen the !s and ?s before.
Although I have not seen this notation used anywhere other than in this book.

[Assassin]

[img]redface.gif[/img] Well, in every Saturday's newspaper here, a GM posts games of famous ones, and it was always N for Knight. If there's any doubt as to which one moved, they'll usually say something like Nd4-b3 or something.

[Encard]

Good game, indeed. I don't have the notation, sorry... I do, however, have a nice chess openings website. http://www.eudesign.com/chessops/ch-clear.htm

As for knight notation, in modern format it's just N. I think the old format used Kn... Sounds like the book LennonCook mentioned used the old format for noation, in any case.

[ 05-27-2004, 10:46 PM: Message edited by: Encard ]

[Black Baron]

Nice site. For detailed information a book is needed, however.