Chess Tips: How to Analyze a Position

Hi everyone! Welcome to my sixth blog in the series I created the series called "Chess Tips" where I teach you some useful skills you can use in your own games. Now let's get started!

As you might know, analyzing a position is a very important skill to master. However, many chess players analyze positions almost spontaneously, without a well-defined plan. The possible outcome of this is incomplete analyzes with missing possibilities. In this blog, I will give you 7 tips on how to analyze better.

#1: Material Advantage

This is an important element of analyzing. Keeping other factors equal, the side that have more material will always have a better position. That is why I suggest start evaluate material which is pretty easy to do.

#2: King Safety

Even though counting material is important, it doesn't exactly tell us what is happening on the board. For instance, if you say that you are up a whole rook, but getting a mate in 1, it would be silly to say that you have a huge advantage. Thus, the position of the king should always be considered when evaluating a position. (You can check the pawns around the king, defensive pieces around the king and the number of attackers to determine the safety of your king. If there are 2 more attackers than your defenders, your king will mostly likely suffer from a sacrifice.) 

#3: Piece Activities

Your pieces have the ability to create different threats. Therefore, it is important to keep them active. It is another important factor to take into account when analyzing. 

To compare activity of the pieces for both sides, you need to take each white piece and compare it with black pieces. For example, the white knight can be controlling 3 squares while the black knight controls 4. That means the black knight is a more active piece.

Nevertheless, if the white knight controls the 3 squares near the opponent’s king while the black knight controls 4 at the opposite side of the board, we would call the white knight more active since it’s more ‘useful’. 

#4: Diagonal Control

By controlling diagonal, especially long ones, you will definitely have a positional advantage, assuming other factors are equal.

#5: Center Control

Control of the center (e4-d4-e5-d5 squares) is another crucial element that needs to be thought when evaluating a position. The importance of the center is allowing more possibilities for attacking as well as reducing counter-attacks created by your opponent.

The side that controls the center often has more active pieces, controls more important squares and also have a safer king position.

#6: Space

Control of space allows you to position your pieces in a attacking/defending position fast and easy. If you are short of space, it will be much harder to transfer your pieces to one side of the board. 

You can estimate how much space each side has by counting the number of squares controlled by the pieces and pawns on the opponent’s side of the board. Most likely, the side that possesses a spatial advantage should attack and pressure the opponent’s position. Attacking multiple targets at once often decides the game, since your opponent cannot reorganize his defenses due to lack of space

#7: Pawn Structure

The pawn structure is related to space, control of the center and strong/weak squares. At the same time, you also should pay attention to pawn weaknesses such as backwards pawns, weak pawns, doubled pawns, etc. They can easily become a target and will be a burden in endgames.

That is all for this blog! Thank you so much for reading it, I really appreciated it and pls comment if you learned something new! I hope you have a nice day! Now see you next week! (I am also in desperate need of blog topics so pls comment if you have one.) P.S. I might write about different openings in my next blog