by Michael Hatcher

Created on: June 05, 2009

With all the books and magazines on chess skills and strategies, what is the best way to go about learning to improve one's game? There is a specific answer to this. But rather than just give you the answer, let me try to convince you in a way that will leave you with a solid conviction that you know how to go about improving your game.

Many people who don't even know how to play chess are familiar with the concept of a pawn. A pawn denotes weakness and cheapness. The value of a queen in the game of chess might be less familiar to a non-chess player but to chess players, a queen denotes strength and is considered worth far more than a pawn. So why is a queen worth more than a pawn? The answer is that a queen can move farther and to so many more squares than a pawn. The key word is: "Mobility" all strategies, all tactics, and ultimately the whole game is about mobility. Control of the center, doubled pawns, even the concept of "material" at its core is mobility.

There are by far more books on chess openings than on any other part of the game. The reasons opening books out number others exceed the scope of this article but the point of all of them is to have some type of control or influence on the four center squares on the chess board. Why are those four so important? It goes back to mobility. Take a chessboard with nothing on it. Now take a knight and place it in any corner square. If you count the number of squares it can move to from a corner square, the number is two. Now count how many squares a knight can move to from any of the center squares. The answer is eight. Thus a knight is four times more mobile from a center square than a corner square.

While no expert player would deny the importance of mobility in chess, some might argue that the concept of "material" is complimentary but different than mobility. A rook, at the start of the game is stuck in a corner, can't move anywhere , and only protects two adjacent squares. Most pawns (except end pawns) start where they can move forward into either of two squares and also protect two different squares than the ones into which they can move. Am I saying at the start of the game a pawn is worth more than a rook because it is more mobile? No. A Swiss mathematician who lived in the 1700s developed a "point system" for the value of each chess piece. His name was Leohard Euler.

Euler's point system was that a pawn was the "base" and thus he gave it the value of "one". Knights and

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