The Importance of Piece Activity and King Safety
For many players, how many points they have determines if they’re winning or not in a chess game. As we saw earlier, that is not the case; the way to determine who is winning in a position is to evaluate:
1) King safety
2) Piece activity
3) Material
4) Pawn structure
The position must be evaluated in that order. If you are not familiar with this, please read our blog post on that before continuing.
As number 1 and 2 are king safety and piece activity respectively, it means that they are more important than material; thus, we can arrive at the conclusion that the false belief by many players that how many points you have determines who is better is false. Yes, material is important, but more important is king safety and piece activity.
Let’s take a look at a position. Who do you think is better in this position? White or black?
Even though black is up by a significant amount of material/points, white is completely winning in this position. The reason is that black’s king, first of all, is exposed with no cover. Black is unable to defend checkmate from all three of white’s major pieces stacked on the g-file.
Secondly, white’s pieces are more active. Even though he only has 4 pieces (excluding pawns), all of them are well placed and are ready to pounce. Black on the other hand has many more pieces/material/points, but none of them are threatening white and so are placed poorly.
So, we can see that king safety and piece activity should be in greater focus than material. That doesn’t mean that material is important; it is, but you should not be greedy, trying to gobble up as many pieces you can at the expense of your king safety and/or your piece activity.
In the below game, Magnus Carlsen, the current world champion, played Hikaru Nakamura in game one of the Magnus Carlsen Chess Tour Finals benefiting Kiva (2020) on August 19th.
In the game, notice how Magnus sacrifices two entire pawns to get better piece activity, and he took this to his advantage to break open the black king and ultimately win the game.
Author: Saharsh Satheesh
