The Pieces and Their Control of the Board

How each piece projects force and space across the board — the second chapter of Znosko-Borovsky's The Middle Game in Chess, reissued with interactive diagrams.

Editor's note: Chapter 2 of Znosko-Borovsky's The Middle Game in Chess (G. Bell & Sons, 1922) opens by grouping the men into three classes — line-commanders, circle-commanders, and the hybrid Queen — then turns to each in turn. The chapter's longest and most influential section is on Pawns; that section is reproduced with light editorial bridging and every original diagram rebuilt as a live board. King, Queen, Rook, Bishop, and Knight follow in the compressed form Znosko-Borovsky himself uses in this chapter — their detailed treatment belongs to later chapters on plan and attack.

The conditions of the game, Znosko-Borovsky reminds us at the outset, are space and time — and it is the chessmen who animate both. Setting the King aside (his hour comes in the ending), he divides the remaining forces first by temperament:

1. Dynamic, active elements — the pieces proper. 2. Static, immobile elements — the Pawns.

And then he divides the pieces themselves by the shape of their control:

1. Line-commanders — Rook and Bishop. 2. Circle-commanders — Knight (and King). 3. Line- and -circle — the Queen alone.

This is not a mere curiosity of classification. Every recommendation that follows — where to place a Rook, when to advance a Pawn, why a Knight excels on a hole — is a consequence of this taxonomy. He turns first to the humblest class.

Znosko-Borovsky begins with the property we all learn on the first day and then, he says, spend the rest of our chess lives failing to respect: the Pawns cannot move backwards, so they must be advanced with care.

From this single fact the whole doctrine of the pawn structure unfolds. The pieces, he writes, roll like waves in different directions, but each Pawn move alters the position irretrievably. The Pawn is the game's memory. Every advance is a small vow the player will have to keep.

The Endgame Journal collects our writing on openings, tactics, endgames, and the habits that separate players who improve from players who plateau. Every article is written by people who teach chess, not by a content farm.

Pieces & Their Control — Middle Game Ch. 2 | Endgame Society