Inferior Positions: Holding On and Fighting Back

Defence when you stand worse — the four defensive classes and how to survive the middlegame. Chapter 7 of Znosko-Borovsky's The Middle Game in Chess.

"The object of the defence is, first of all, to destroy the influence of the enemy over its own moves." — Znosko-Borovsky, 1922

The Same Position, Seen from the Other Side

Chapter 6 studied middle games from the side that owned the advantage. This chapter turns the board around. The position on the diagram is the same; only the colour of the pieces we are playing has changed.

That symmetry matters. Znosko-Borovsky is emphatic that inferior-position play is not a separate craft with its own rules — it is the mirror of superior-position play. The player who has the advantage is trying to increase it, cash it, and prevent your counter-play; the player who is worse is trying to prevent all three. Everything one side does, the other side must anticipate and answer.

But defence has one obligation the attack does not have: before you make a plan, you must decide what kind of position you are actually in.

The First Question: Is His Advantage Enough to Win?

The single most important question at the start of a defensive game is the one most players never explicitly ask themselves:

"It is useful to ask ourselves if the enemy's advantage is enough in itself to win, or if it has to be increased considerably in order to give winning chances."

The answer completely changes what you should do next.

- If the advantage is already winning, you cannot afford a quiet game. Your only hope is complication — you must construct plans and manoeuvres that force the stronger side to solve fresh problems, in the hope that the solution he chooses is not the best one. Complicated is safer than simple, because simple positions favour the side with the objectively better cards. - If the advantage is not yet winning, the reverse is true. Your object is negative and simple: do not make your position worse. Do not create new weaknesses trying to fix the old ones. Do not chase equality with a lunge that concedes a second weakness on the way. If you do nothing to help him, he must find the whole win by himself, and he may not.

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Inferior Positions — The Middle Game in Chess, Ch. 7 | Endgame Society