Queen side vs. King side Castle

I was wondering what the conventional wisdom is regarding castling towards the queen side vs. the king side.

Any thoughts?

It depends on the position and your preference of style of play. 

it depend on the position. but the most of the time the player who can attack first with the pawn has advantage. (i think)

Well then he didn't want to know the answer to the question.  It will ALWAYS depend on the whole board. 

You generally want to castle on the side which will put your rooks on more active squares and/or make your king safer. If you don't know the answer to those questions, perhaps you're castling too early! You want to be ready to castle as quickly as possible, but it's often useful to delay the actual move. Another consideration is that if you and your opponent castle on opposite sides, a pawn storm will typically follow.

Also watch for tactics... after queenside castling your rooks are often vulnerable to forks and your a-pawn may be unprotected. On the plus side, enemy bishops and knights are sometimes trappable when they carelessly steal your rook pawn.

The ramifications of castling are as following:

-If the pawn structure is compromised on a side, then do not castle on that side.

-There are exceptions...

-If the queenside castle is unavailable, due to castling through check, then castle on the kingside unless it will hurt you, because of an attack on both your king and queenside.

-If there is an attack with a castle, which is why you could just wait and not move your king or rook (either side) if possible and just wait until the endgame, which is unlikely, or wait until the other person castles and castle on the opposite side or attack.

In a lot of the games that I have played outside of chess.com, I have seen this a lot.

-d_seer

 I read in a book that castling to opposite sides is a sign of aggressive play because it opens up files in the middle of the board for the Rooks to run their courses.

always depends on the position of the board.

I played a street player otb in Chicago who's whole strategy was based on attacking a king side castle. On the second and third games I refrained from casteling and his whole game fell apart.

Man... I absolutely HATE to give away my game... but many times (upon jumping back into the game after about 2 years) I've found that NOT castling leaves an opponent confused and enables me to focus more on material gain.  Of course if they focused more on that too, instead of which direction I would castle on, then I'd be in bad shape. I've always held castling to be an escape... not a strategy. I'm sure it's possible to make my opponent's castle part of my strategy... but I'm not there yet.  I mean hey... can't you "force" someone to castle kingside and have an attack in mind on that side anyway?

Castling on the same side will often lead to a more positionally styled game. I say this only in comparison to what castling on opposite sides is like. Castling on opposite sides will usually result in more tactical games. Pawns are often worth much less than open lines against the opposing king.

I think it really depends what kind of player you are. People are saying that it depends on the position. While this is true, the whole point of the opening is to make the position favorable to your style of play. So it is mostly true that you can castle on whichever side you want to... as long as you have this goal in mind from the beginning of the game.

I find that castling queenside is generally more aggressive than castling kingside. Queenside castling activates your rook on the d file immediately, whereas kingside castling usually puts your rook right behind your pawn on f2 and requires a tempo to move the rook to a more active square.

Also note that you can create a queen and rook battery easily by moving your queen to d2 followed by O-O-O; you can create mate threats easily with this quick series of moves.

I prefer Queen castle. As the first comment suggests though it absolutely depends on the position of the opponents pieces. If it appears they have been preparing for a king side attack then castle queen. I also like to do this because most people seem to castle king side and it allows me to use my king side pawns in a pawn march to attack the other player's castle and allows for me king to be safe.

I don't know rules on threadmancy here yet but I'd like to add my 2 cents:

Both castling sides sort of imply an extra move:

- King side: the rook has to be activated by moving to the center

- Queen side: king is near the center and a1 is undefended so Kb1 is the implied move.

That makes Queen-side more agressive and King-side more defensive from the starting position until you get that one move out. However by the time you get that move out, it may be too late, especially on Queen-side.