This is the last chapter of the intermediate course, and it works differently from the rest: instead of one topic, it goes piece by piece through everything on the board and asks what each one is actually good at. Start with the piece everyone underrates. A pawn is worth one point on its own — the lowest value in the game — but your eight of them together are worth more than any single piece except the queen, and the way they're arranged shapes almost everything else that happens in a game. That overall arrangement is called the pawn structure, and most openings steer toward one or two recognizable structures. Learn the structure that comes out of the openings you play and you'll often see the right plan before you've calculated a single line.
The tool for reshaping a structure mid-game is the pawn break: a forward pawn push whose whole point is to provoke a favorable trade, usually one that tears open a file or diagonal for your pieces, or clears a square you want to use.
The general rule is that the more pawns come off the board, the more open the position becomes — and a more open structure comes from the Maróczy Bind of the Sicilian Defense below. Here it's worth introducing pawn complexes: which color squares your own pawns actually live on. In the position below, six of White's seven pawns sit on light squares. That makes White's grip on the light squares very strong, but it leaves the dark squares looking like Swiss cheese — full of holes for Black's pieces to move into. This cuts both ways when you're deciding which bishop to trade: giving up the bishop that matches your weak color is usually fine, since you weren't covering those squares well anyway, but giving up the bishop that matches your strong color throws away real reinforcement.
Space matters here too. In the King's Indian Defense, Black typically grabs kingside space and White grabs queenside space, which is exactly why the middlegame plans split down the middle: each side races to attack on the wing where it already has room to work.
White's b3 push works precisely because it's nowhere near White's own king — both sides have castled kingside in this structure, so White is free to throw queenside pawns forward without weakening anything that matters. Pushing pawns that shelter your own king is a different story entirely.
One more structure worth knowing on sight: the Caro-Kann Advance, where White claims a big central pawn duo that cramps Black's pieces. Black's only realistic counters are the breaks ...c5 and ...f6 — there's no third option, since those are the only pawn moves that actually challenge White's center rather than just sitting behind it.
Zoom out from any single opening and a few structural ideas keep recurring in every kind of position. A group of pawns on connected files is a pawn island (or cluster); having more pawns than your opponent in one such group is a majority, and a well-supported majority is exactly the kind of asset that turns into a passed pawn — and eventually a new queen — once most of the pieces are off the board.
An isolated pawn has no friendly pawn on either neighboring file, which means no pawn will ever be able to defend it. That's not automatically fatal — an isolated pawn backed by active pieces can be a real asset, using the open lines beside it to attack — but the position below shows the downside.
Doubled pawns — two pawns of the same color stacked on one file, almost always the residue of a capture — are genuinely controversial. They're less mobile, and by definition the front one isn't defended by the one behind it. But the capture that creates them frequently blows open a file or diagonal for a rook, bishop, or queen, and an extra pawn on a file can add real defensive cover too.
A pawn chain is a diagonal line of same-colored pawns, each one defended by the pawn sitting behind it — except for the pawn at the very base, which needs a piece's help instead.
Chains often point the direction of the whole game. In the French Defense position below, both armies have their own chain, and each one points at the wing where that side has the space to attack.
A pawn storm only works with pawns that aren't sheltering your own king. That's exactly why storms are most common — and safest — in games where the two players have castled on opposite wings: each side is free to throw its own kingside (or queenside) pawns forward without exposing its own king in the process.
All of this — structures, breaks, complexes, islands, blockades, chains, storms — comes from a piece worth a single point on its own. Learn to read a pawn structure and you're reading the whole board's plan before a single piece has moved.
Both minor pieces carry a textbook value of three points, but plenty of elite players — Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov among them — rated the bishop a little higher, somewhere around 3.15 to 3.25 against the knight's flat 3.0. The gap comes down to reach.
That reach lets a bishop do something a knight can never do to it in return: trap it completely on an open board.
The knight's compensation is versatility. It's the only piece in chess that can hop clean over anything — its own pieces, the opponent's, a wall of pawns — and because its attack is an L-shape unlike anything else on the board, knight forks are uniquely hard to see coming. A bishop, meanwhile, only ever sees half the board: your light-squared bishop is permanently blind to every dark square, and vice versa. Both knights, in theory, can eventually reach all 64 squares.
The more pawns remain on the board, the more closed the position, and closed positions are where bishops struggle most.
The pattern holds in general: knights are jacks-of-all-trades who don't much care whether a position is open or closed, while bishops love open lines and suffer badly when the board locks up.
A bishop's long reach means it can do damage from far away without ever moving; a knight has to get physically close to be useful — think of a boxer with a long jab versus one who has to step inside to land a punch. That's exactly what makes an outpost so valuable for a knight: a square, usually deep in enemy territory, that no enemy pawn can ever attack and that isn't worth trading a lesser piece to remove.
A pawn defending a knight on an outpost doesn't get in the knight's own way — the knight can hop straight back over its defender's head to attack. A pawn defending a bishop, on the other hand, physically blocks that diagonal. That's why outposts favor knights even though bishops can technically sit on one too. Knights also do something no pair of bishops ever can: team up to cover the exact same square, since the two bishops always run on opposite colors.
Having both bishops while your opponent has given one up is generally a real edge, especially at higher levels — you simply control more total squares than a player with only one bishop can. But the edge isn't automatic.
On balance, especially as the position opens up, the bishop is the slightly stronger piece. Giving one up for a knight without a concrete reason — a real tactic, a real structural gain — is a habit worth breaking. Seven times out of ten, keeping the bishop pays off in the long run.
Rooks start tucked away in the corners and, at five points, are the strongest piece before the queen. Part of the reason: a rook covers fourteen squares whether it's parked in the dead center of an empty board or jammed into a corner — a bishop or knight sees far fewer squares from a corner than from the middle. A rook is also the only piece besides the queen that can force checkmate together with a lone king; you simply cannot do that with a king and bishop, or a king and knight.
That doesn't mean rooks are useful early. They tend to arrive to the game late — often around move ten, sometimes sooner, sometimes later — because they need the rest of the army out of the way first.
The rook's real ambition is an open file — one with few or no pawns on it — since that lets it pressure the entire length of the board.
Rooks hit hardest working in pairs. Doubling vertically on a file behind another piece creates a battery with real teeth.
Rooks can also double up horizontally rather than sharing a file — most famously by both landing on the seventh rank, where they scoop up every stray pawn along that rank and can hunt down a king trapped on the back row. Try to find the finish before you press Show solution.
A rook's relative value shifts with the position — it isn't always a "full" five-point piece. Sacrificing the exchange (a rook for a bishop or knight) can be worth it for compensation, whether that means an immediate attack or lasting structural damage.
A rook lift doesn't need a central file to work — sometimes the fastest way to activate one is to throw a flank pawn forward and let the rook follow it up.
Chapter One's Scholar's Mate discussion already made the point that rushing the queen out early is risky — you're one piece against 39 points of enemy material, and without support she gets chased around and loses time rather than doing damage. It's still true, by the way, that cheap early-queen tricks can win you the odd beginner-level game; they just stop working entirely once your opponents cross into intermediate strength and start punishing them instead. The real payoff of the queen shows up once she's working with teammates — a star player still needs a supporting cast to win anything.
Rozman likes to compare queens to the dragons in Game of Thrones: it's no surprise they're the most powerful and valuable pieces on the board, since they can seemingly do it all. On an empty board a queen sees a maximum of 27 squares — nearly half the board at once, which alone tells you why losing track of her safety is so costly, and why you should check on her as often as you check on your own king.
A queen lined up with a rook on the same file, rank, or diagonal makes a devastating battery, and a queen and bishop can do the same thing.
The rarer combination — and arguably the most dangerous of all — is queen and knight. Because the knight attacks in an L-shape no other piece can copy, the two together can blanket squares that would otherwise need three separate pieces to cover.
Even without help, a lone queen is exceptionally dangerous, especially for forks that combine a check with a threat on a second, undefended piece. No other piece can switch from a straight line to a diagonal — or the reverse — in a single move the way a queen can. Try to find it before you press Show solution.
Everyone blunders their queen sometimes on the way up the ratings ladder — it's a painful but genuinely normal part of learning to handle your most valuable piece. Use your queen to attack, not to babysit your own king; a queen stuck on defense is a queen you've effectively taken off the board. And trading queens is neither always good nor always bad on principle — it depends entirely on whether the position that's left over, and the material balance in it, favors you.
Early on, it's tempting to judge a trade purely by the point count — a bishop for a knight, a rook for a rook, all "even." But a trade reshapes the whole position, not just the material total: pieces suddenly see squares they didn't before, files crack open, and one side's plans get easier while the other's get harder. Evaluating a trade properly means weighing all of that, not just doing arithmetic.
Opening trades are their own category, because some captures are simply forced by theory. In the Scotch Opening, Black has to take on d4 or hand White the entire center outright — so after 1...exd4 2.Nxd4, it's Black's move, sizing up that centralized knight. Try to find Black's best move before you press Show solution.
The Semi-Slav shows the same restraint with pawns instead of pieces: White's c4-pawn and Black's d5-pawn stare at each other, and neither side wants to blink. If White captures, Black recaptures with the e-pawn and gets quick, easy development; if Black captures first, White recaptures with the bishop onto a great diagonal and gains a central pawn majority. Since neither capture is clearly better for the side making it, both sides simply leave the tension alone and develop around it.
Beyond the opening, weigh every trade against the whole board, not just the points. The table below is a starting point, not a law — every position can produce an exception.
| Do trade… | Don't trade… |
|---|---|
| when you're up material, to simplify toward a winning endgame | when you're down material — fewer pieces means fewer chances to fight back |
| to gain a positional edge: doubling the opponent's pawns, creating a weakness, opening their king, or swapping a bad piece of yours for a good piece of theirs | a good, active piece of yours for a bad, passive piece of theirs — even if it wins a small amount of material |
| when you're under attack and removing the attacking pieces saves you | when you're attacking and removing your own attacking pieces would kill the attack |
If you can't explain out loud what a trade actually gains you, don't make it. Equal material after a trade doesn't mean the resulting position is equal — and rigid personal rules ("I never trade queens," "I always trade bishops for knights") don't survive contact with an actual chessboard, which doesn't care about your habits.
Here's pure simplification, from one of Rozman's own blitz games. He's playing Black, up the exchange (a rook for a knight), and wants to trade down toward a winning endgame.
Trading can also manufacture a positional edge outright, even against the "usual" rule of thumb. Below, White wants the d5 outpost for a knight, but Black's f6-knight guards it for now. Try to find White's plan before you press Show solution.
A trade can create a lasting weakness rather than just an even swap. Below, Black offers a queen trade that looks perfectly balanced on paper. Try to find the catch before you press Show solution.
Trading also has a defensive job: giving up the attacking piece — even at a material cost — can shut down a mating attack outright.
Two traps are worth naming directly. First, a good piece for a bad one is never justified by the point count alone, no matter how equal the arithmetic looks. Try to find it before you press Show solution.
Not every version of "great piece for bad piece" is this obvious, though. Try to find which piece is secretly the strong one, and which is dead weight, before you press Show solution.
Second, watch for trades that look materially even but leave you structurally worse. Six points for six isn't automatically a wash. Try to find the flaw before you press Show solution.
The CCA checklist from Chapter Fourteen — checks, captures, attacks — gets one more layer at this level: before running it for yourself, ask "what does my opponent want?" Sometimes the threat announces itself; sometimes it takes real effort to find. Skipping this question is exactly how good players still walk into bad positions — you can play a perfectly reasonable-looking move and still miss that it completely ignores your opponent's plan.
Putting it together: scan for the opponent's threat first, then run checks, captures, and attacks for both sides, actually evaluating each one rather than just listing it. If none of that applies, look for a move that simply improves your position — a more active piece, more space, a better structure.
Here it is working correctly, from one of Rozman's own games. Black has just played ...e5, and the threat is ...e4, forking the queen and bishop. Try to find White's best answer before you press Show solution.
The checklist can also flag your own moves as dangerous before you play them. In this next game, Rozman's king had drifted to f3 — "partied too hard and stumbled into the middle of the board," as he tells it — and Black pounced with ...f5.
Just as often, the checklist's real value shows up when nothing forcing exists at all — and the temptation is to trade "because you can" rather than because it helps.
Running the checklist isn't enough on its own — you have to apply it honestly, including asking what the opponent wants. Here's a game against a fellow International Master. Try to find whether White's plan is actually safe before you press Show solution.
Here's a funnier version of the same lesson. Try to find whether White's plan is actually safe before you press Show solution.
The funniest — and most painful — example came in a blitz game with only five or six seconds left on the clock, against the American prodigy Christopher Yoo. Black had just played ...Rf4, offering what looked like a free rook. Try to find out whether it actually is before you press Show solution.
Even strong players skip steps under pressure. Castling into a pawn storm because you only checked your own king's safety, attacking a pawn with a rook without checking whether the rook itself could get trapped, or grabbing a "blundered" piece without asking whether your opponent set a trap — all of these come from running only half the checklist. The fix never changes: pause and ask what the opponent is threatening before deciding your move is safe.
This chapter closes out the intermediate material in this course, but it's nowhere near the end of what there is to learn — chess doesn't have a ceiling. From here, progress mostly comes from independent study rather than another chapter: solving large numbers of tactics puzzles until patterns become instant recognition, reviewing your own games (ideally with an engine, or against a friend if you don't have one handy) to find out exactly where you went wrong and why, and studying openings in more depth once you have a feel for the structures and plans they produce.
A few habits are worth carrying forward specifically: keep running the CCA checklist — for both sides — on every move, not just when something looks sharp. Keep asking what your opponent wants before deciding your own plan is safe. And keep a mental glossary of the terms this course has introduced, since naming a pattern is often the first step to recognizing it instantly the next time it shows up. A handful worth keeping sharp:
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Zugzwang | You have to move, but every legal move makes your position worse. |
| Zwischenzug | An "in-between" move — usually a forcing one — inserted before the move everyone expects. |
| Tempo | A move that gains initiative by forcing your opponent into a purely defensive reply. |
| Luft | An escape square carved out for your castled king so a back-rank check can't be mate. |
| Discovered attack | Moving one piece out of the way to unleash a threat from a piece behind it. |
| Deflection | Sacrificing material to lure a defending piece away from the square or piece it was protecting. |
| Exchange up/down | Having traded a knight or bishop for an opponent's rook (up), or the reverse (down). |
| Fianchetto | Developing a bishop one square diagonally from its home rank, onto the long diagonal. |
Above all, keep playing and keep reviewing. Ratings climb through repetition, not through reading alone — every blundered queen and missed tactic is part of the same process that eventually makes those mistakes rare.
Pawns form the skeleton of every position: their structure, breaks, complexes, islands, majorities, chains, and weaknesses (isolated, backward, doubled) shape what every other piece is able to do, and recognizing the structure typical of your own openings — London, Maróczy, King's Indian, Caro-Kann, French — tells you the plan before you've calculated a line. Doubled pawns aren't automatically weak, and pawn storms only work with pawns that aren't sheltering your own king.
Bishops edge out knights as the generally stronger minor piece thanks to their 13-versus-8 reach and their ability to cross the board in one move, though knights hold their own by hopping over blockades, working any kind of position, and dominating outposts — where a defending pawn doesn't block their own attack the way it blocks a bishop's diagonal. Rooks arrive late but hit hardest on open files and the seventh rank, especially in pairs, and their five-point value flexes when an exchange sacrifice buys a real attack. The queen is devastating once supported — batteries with a rook or bishop, and especially with a knight — but a liability when overextended alone or stuck defending passively; even the best players blunder her occasionally, and that's a normal, survivable part of getting stronger.
Trading is a skill of its own: material counts matter far less than what a trade does to the resulting position. Opening trades are their own category, since some captures are forced by theory while others (keeping the tension) are simply better development. The "do trade / don't trade" guidelines in this chapter are starting points, not laws — evaluate every trade by what it changes on the board, not by the point count alone. Finally, the CCA checklist, extended with "what does my opponent want?", is the closest thing this course offers to a universal move-selection habit — not a substitute for calculation, but a discipline that keeps you from missing what's already sitting on the board, whether you're a beginner or, as more than one of Rozman's own stories in this chapter shows, a titled player under pressure.
A pawn break is a forward push aimed at provoking a trade that benefits you — typically by opening a file or diagonal for your pieces or clearing a square for a piece to land on. It's worth it even at some structural cost because the resulting activity or space usually outweighs the loosened pawns.
Both sides have castled kingside in this King's Indian structure, so White's queenside push and Black's kingside push both happen far away from each player's own king. Neither side is loosening the pawns actually sheltering their king — that's exactly what makes both storms safe at the same time.
An isolated pawn has no pawn of its own color on either neighboring file, so it can never be defended by a pawn. A backward pawn does have neighbors, but it can't safely advance because the opponent controls the square ahead of it, and no pawn behind it can support the push.
No. They're less mobile and the front pawn isn't defended by the one behind it, but the capture that creates them often opens a file or diagonal for a rook, queen, or bishop, and they can add useful defensive coverage. They're only clearly bad when they're also isolated or backward, with no compensation for the lost mobility.
Reach: a bishop on a central square of an empty board covers 13 squares versus a knight's 8, and a bishop can shift from one side of the board to the other in a single move, which a knight needs four or five moves to do. A knight compensates by working in any kind of position, hopping over blockades, and being especially strong on outposts, where a defending pawn doesn't block its own line of attack.
It's usually in the opponent's territory, no enemy pawn can ever attack it, and removing the piece there would cost the opponent more material than it's worth. Outposts favor knights because a pawn defending a knight doesn't block the knight's own attack, while a pawn defending a bishop physically blocks that bishop's diagonal.
An open file has no pawns blocking the rook's path, so it can pressure the entire length of the board. Two rooks doubled on the seventh (or second) rank attack every remaining pawn on that rank simultaneously and can often deliver a forced mating sequence of checks against a king still on the back rank, as in Board 27.
Rxf6 rips open the defenses around Black's king; the recapture ...gxf6 leaves the king much more exposed, and White's queen and lifted rook follow up with a dangerous attack. The material deficit stops mattering once the attack is strong enough — relative value, not raw points, is what counts.
A knight attacks in an L-shape that no other piece can replicate, so a queen and knight together can cover combinations of squares that would otherwise take three pieces to control. Unlike a queen-rook or queen-bishop battery, they never line up on the same file, rank, or diagonal — they always attack from different angles at once.
The point count is equal, but the pieces aren't: two flexible minor pieces are usually worth more in practice than a rook that hasn't yet found an open file to use, especially early in the game when the rook is undeveloped. The trade tends to leave the side giving up the minor pieces effectively down a piece in everything but name.
The d6 knight is dominant and causing constant problems for Black, while the c8 bishop hasn't moved all game and isn't doing anything. Capturing it would trade away White's best piece for Black's worst one — a bad trade no matter what the point values say, since the position, not the label on the piece, decides its real worth.
He pushed his rook to b4 to attack a pawn without checking his opponent's checks, captures, and attacks in return. Black quietly defended and then trapped the rook with a bishop move, leaving it with no safe square — a direct consequence of only running half the CCA checklist.
"What does my opponent want?" It matters because checks, captures, and attacks only cover your own forcing options — without first identifying your opponent's plan or threat, you can play a reasonable-looking move that completely ignores what they're about to do, which is how strong players still occasionally blunder into lost positions.