Coordination of the pieces

There is one typical mistake which less experienced players often make: they develop only two pieces and then try to play on and attack their opponent with these pieces. If an experienced player doesn't actually falloff his chair laughing, then he will find it easy to deal with these attacking attempts, since he simply has more pieces available for the defense. Of course you should not behave like that; you should also bring your reserves into play.

It is very important to develop all the pieces quickly. But it is also necessary to be able to coordinate these same pieces well. The pieces have to mutually support and complement one another. In the ideal case they should form a single unit. They are only really strong when they work together. Coordinated units are much stronger than an army with regiments which are not cooperating with each other.

In the endgame the coordination of the pieces plays an even greater part. In his masterpiece My System, Nimzowitsch describes the importance of coordination in these terms:

'Coordination is 80 per cent of all endgame technique; all the individual topics we have treated here such as centralization, bridge building, hiding and gap plugging are subordinate to the main goal, coordination. They are like the cogs which fit together in the movement of a clock and set the whole mechanism in motion; so what we are talking about is a slow but steady advance of the serried ranks of your army. "General advance!" is the watchword!'