I look at it that white controls a lot more squares than Black does, particularly since white controls squares in Black's camp.
How do you define 'territory'?
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A combination of how much room your pieces have to move and how well your pieces control the center of the board, is how I would define it.
paul211 wrote:
SuiteLycee wrote:
A combination of how much room your pieces have to move and how well your pieces control the center of the board, is how I would define it.
This is not a definition of territory, you have to learn your basic chess terminology.
What you are defining is quality on the board, a difficult concept to understand, what it means is how much or how many squares you are controlling, and many times very difficult to take advantage of.
Learn chess terminology and do not say what you think it is. The territory has been well defined and it is not a matter of piece positionning but rather what defines the boundaries of your area.
That's harsh. Yes "area behind pawns" is a pedantic definition of territory, but chess is a game and does not accept pedantic definitions. The description SuiteLycee gave is a perfectly good explaination of how to use territory well and in vaguer territories like Silman's diagram may be better than the hard and fast definition.
paul211 wrote:
SuiteLycee wrote:
A combination of how much room your pieces have to move and how well your pieces control the center of the board, is how I would define it.
This is not a definition of territory, you have to learn your basic chess terminology.
Ouch! Anyway, yours wasn't a definition of 'territory' either! You simply talked about White's side of the board and Black's side of the board.
I stumbled upon the following diagram in The Amateur's Mind:
Silman says that White "enjoys some advantage in territory". How does someone determine who has the most territory in such a position?
I understand that a player's terrority is generally said to be the area behind the player's pawns, but what if some pawns are missing, like in the diagram above?
I'm thinking that maybe open files count as nobody's territory, but then the whole concept of 'territory' seems pretty redundant in positions such as the above.