Spacecenter

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Thinking about the center due to a comment of Blunderprone has opened a Pandora's box of thoughts and ideas. To name a few:

• The importance of space
• What you can do with that space
• The blocking of your pieces
• Center pawns being pinned
• Manoeuvring in the space behind your center pawns
• Different values of diagonals
• 3 diagonals through the center (per bishop)
• 3 diagonals ending up in the neighbourhood of the enemy king
• possibility to change the pawnstructure vs being blocked
• possibility to block
• possibility to open lines
• if your pieces protect each other they stand in each others way
• battle for central squares
  

Definitively the center is an asset of its own. Its not implicitly derived from piece activity. In the middlegame I managed to share a whole lotta types of moves under the same noumer piece activity. I'm trying to do something equal with the list above. I'm not very far in this process yet but the common noumer flexibility seems to cover at least a few of the topics above.

On another note I'm doing well at Corus. Sofar I have scored 1.5 out of 3. If I can maintain 50% I will consider the tournament to be quite succesful. The rating in my group spreads from 1780 to 1905. Every game has been a positional battle and I like it. It looks more like study than competition!

Margriet is doing even better with 2.5/3.