How to Attack the Castled King

Attacking in chess is a tough concept to master. Everybody who has even heard of the game knows that the primary motivation of each player is to checkmate the enemy king. This sounds like a simple enough objective; however, the path to your opponent's king is not so straightforward.

To make things even tougher, the better you get the more murky and unclear this path to checkmate gets. As your opponents grow in strength and your rating begins to increase, you'll notice that people know how to defend! And while this can discourage some players from going for an attack, all that it really means is that you have to modify your approach.

Rather than going for a brutish, caveman-like attack (as I myself am very guilty of up until the rating of about 1600 #friedliver4life), in order to orchestrate master-level attacks, you attacking strategy must transform and become positional in nature. That's right: you have to attack positionally.

This apparent paradox actually makes a lot of sense, when you give it some more thought. For example, in the Sicilian Dragon, one of White's key attacking ideas in the English Attack is a positional one--to trade to dark-square bishops, as Black's DSB is such a great protector of his king.

There are countless other examples of this in attacking chess, and it's near impossible to highlight them all. However, I've provided a video below that better fleshes out the concept of kingside attack, all in only 6 minutes.

If you got some value out of this, please hit that subscribe button to get the latest in educational chess content. Every subscription helps me out a ton. Lets get to 1,000 subscribers!!!