Defence: The Discipline of Standing Firm

Active defence, exchanges, and counter-blows — the discipline of holding a difficult middlegame. Chapter 11 of Znosko-Borovsky's The Middle Game in Chess.

"Unwilling to begin defence he is insufficiently decisive in attack, with the result that White gets the attack by force." — Znosko-Borovsky, on Janowski–Lasker

Chapter 10 sorted attacks into eleven kinds. This chapter, by contrast, sorts defences into four. The disproportion is not accidental. Attack has many geometries because attack has to be constructed; defence has fewer because defence is fundamentally a reaction, and there are only so many stances one can take toward an incoming attack.

Znosko-Borovsky's four defensive stances are:

1. Passive defence — hold, wait, force the attacker to prove his advantage. 2. Passive defence changing to counter-attack — hold until the attacker has committed, then convert the position into an active one. 3. Counter-attack — respond to attack with attack against a target of your own from the first move. 4. Defence by counter-combination — solve the attack tactically, in a single sharp sequence that leaves neither side attacking.

These four are not four opinions about how to defend. They are four strategic classes , each appropriate to a specific kind of position and each inappropriate for the others. Choosing the wrong class is the single most expensive mistake the defender can make.

The theoretical thread that runs through all four is the one Znosko-Borovsky already stated back in Chapter 7 (Inferior Positions): the first question in defence is what your opponent wants to do . This chapter is what happens when you have to answer that question over the board.

The archetype: your opponent has a small structural advantage — a spatial edge, a target — and is starting to press. You have no active resources of your own. What you have is time and room to retreat .

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Defence — The Middle Game in Chess, Ch. 11 | Endgame Society