Tactic: Beware of having your queen and king on the same diagonal

#CenterGame 

There are always risks with early queen moves as the queen will get attacked, and potentially trapped, by less valuable pieces. One particularly thing to look out for, both as the player with the queen out, and as the player trying to threaten the opponent’s queen, are absolute pins. In the earlier part of the game, this will more likely than not be in the situation where the queen and the king are on the same diagonal, with the attacking piece being a bishop. The side that loses a queen for a bishop will probably lose the game. Let’s see an example of the tactic in the following game.

The opponent in this game played the Center Game, which I’ve faced only a few times. This is effectively a gambit, and as we could see in the Stockfish evaluation, it’s entirely okay to accept the gambit, and following up with natural looking developing moves is fine for black. Although I did incrementally gain some advantage in the opening, the loss of the queen by my opponent was terminal. I thought they played really well from that point onwards, but they simply couldn’t recover from the material disadvantage. I hope you found this video interesting, and thanks for watching!

Game on chess.com: https://www.chess.com/game/live/39214249495 

Originally published: https://adventuresofachessnoob.com/2022/03/01/tactic-beware-of-having-your-queen-and-king-on-the-same-diagonal/