Improve Your Worst Piece: Keep Playing Good Moves

Your move was good. Here's the habit that keeps the good moves coming.

A move marked Best or Good means you kept your position. The question is how to keep doing that in quiet positions, where there is nothing to take and nothing to attack. Strong players have a simple answer: find your worst piece and improve it.

The habit

1. Look at each of your pieces and ask: what is it doing?
2. Pick the one doing the least: a bishop blocked by its own pawns, a knight on the edge, a rook still in the corner.
3. Find a better square for it, and a safe way to get there.

What a good square looks like

• Knights: central squares where enemy pawns can't chase them away.
• Bishops: long, open diagonals.
• Rooks: open files, or the seventh rank.
• Queen: active, but not where she can be chased with tempo.

Combine this with the blunder check, and you have a complete routine: first make sure your move is safe, then make sure it makes your position better. That's most of chess.

"If one piece stands badly, the whole game stands badly."

— Siegbert Tarrasch