Chess School Quiz Challenge #17
Challenge
Black attacks the white bishop on g5. What to do?
Solution
Retracting the attacked bishop wouldn't be bad, but there's a much better move. We'll find it if we look at the c3-knight for a moment, rather than at the attacked bishop. Talk to your pieces, remember?
It's easy to see where this knight wants to jump: the d5 square would be a magnificent outpost, where we would have anchored the knight centrally in the opponent's half of the board. But Black has defended the d5 square. The f6 knight is covering it.
And just like that, we have found the right move. Zoya Schleining played 1.Bg5xf6! in this game from the 2023 German Masters to eliminate the defender of d5. In the move that followed, she planted a mighty knight on d5 on his central outpost.
The strength of a knight on its central outpost (in this case e5) was formulated by the Polish-French chess master Savielly Tartakower in one of his numerous “Tartakowerisms”:
