When there is no tactic and no obvious plan, find your worst-placed piece and make it better. Rerouting a knight, freeing a blocked bishop or bringing a rook to an open file quietly wins more games than brilliant combinations.
In Pro
Piece Activity: Improve Your Worst Piece is part of Pro, with all 25 lessons and every quiz.
Pro is $6.99 a month or $49 a year. Start free: three days
in a row earns 72 hours of Pro with no card.
The knight on b1 in a Ruy Lopez has no future on c3, so it goes to d2, then f1, then g3 or e3, and arrives on the king side several moves later as the best piece on the board, having attacked nothing on the way. When there is no tactic and no plan, this is what you do: find the worst piece and improve it.
What you will learn
01How to score each piece by the squares it controls and whether they matter.
02The classic reroutes: the Spanish knight tour and the French bishop by way of ...Bd7 to e8 and g6.
03How to give a rook a file, and the rook lift when no file is open.
04Why games between equals go to the player who runs out of improving moves last.
The plan
Four sections, one per piece type. The Ruy Lopez knight tour, with the pawn on c3 explaining why the knight takes the long road. The French light-squared bishop, which either leaves by ...b6 and ...Ba6 to trade itself, or finds the b1 to h7 diagonal from g6. Rooks, which need files and otherwise a lift along the third rank, Ra1 to a3 to g3. And the test itself: count the squares each piece controls and move the one with the lowest score.
Club players improve the piece they like rather than the one that needs it. The queen gets another move, the good bishop another diagonal, and the knight on b1 stays home until move thirty. Improving the worst piece feels slow because nothing is threatened. It is not slow. Every such move raises the ceiling of every tactic that follows.
How to practise it
The quiz asks two questions in the form of positions: which piece is doing nothing and where should it go, and which of two passive rooks can be activated with tempo. Reply with the move, spoken or tapped. This is a Pro lesson; the free Open Files and Rooks covers the rook half.
Find the piece that controls the fewest useful squares and move it to a square where it controls more, even if that takes several moves and attacks nothing on the way.
What is a rook lift?
Bringing a rook in front of its own pawns along the third or fourth rank so that it joins an attack when no file is open.