So when our opponent pushes his Queen
Pawn forward two squares, we, as black have two options to defend against this.
The first option is to try and secure our pawn
The best way to do this would be to use our Queen pawn.
By choosing this option, we transition
Into what is known as a Philidor defense.
Since we need to block our bishop to defend this pawn.
We don’t want to voluntarily give our opponent any advantages so
we don’t want to do this.
We could also try and secure this pawn
by using our King’s bishop pawn instead
But by doing this, we would
actually open our Kingside up for a huge counter attack.
Our opponent can just take our pawn
And we take back
Then our opponent can just swing their Queen over
and destroy us
If we try and block this attack with our
King knights pawn
Their Queen will just swing over, win our pawn,
and attack our King and rook at the same time
Instead of trying to keep our pawn,
a better option we have is to just taking our opponents pawn and launching a counter attack.
By taking the center pawn, we are actually give up our King pawn
But we’ll target our opponents
Center pawn and force him to defend this center pawn
Either that pawn will fall or by our opponent being stuck defending it
some other weakness will be created on the board that we can exploit.
We do this by first done by chasing away our opponents queen
while developing a piece.
This is a good move because it follows a fundamental opening principle.
Developing a piece while threatening something.
After the queen retreats…
We start coordinating our pieces to attack that center pawn
And with good play, we should be able to
gain an advantage over our opponent.
Since we’ll be able to swing our rook over
And cause a lot of problems for white if he tries
to keep that pawn.
You've earned the Center Game Badge and now mastered the Center Game.
