How to Trade Pieces in the Game of Chess

Video Transcript

"Hi! My name is Ken and I am here today to talk to you about playing Chess. As we talked about so far we've dealed with different openings and the openings are part of the opening part of the game. But the middle part of the game is where the real strategy comes in. Again, your capturing other pieces working your way towards the King. So looking a little closer at this let me just show you that one of the concepts you should be aware of is trading pieces. One should always never be afraid to trade pieces. Trading pieces can be to your advantage. What do I mean by trading pieces. Let's just do a quick opening here. Once again this is the King's opening and I've got my pieces out here like this and it sort of looks like this, the correspondence over here, something like this. Now this person moves this Pawn up. I take that Pawn; you only can take Pawns diagonally and he takes it back. Now it could be that I have my Knight out here, so what I can do here is trade pieces. So I am trading which is a 3 point piece, the Bishop which gets takes back by the Queen for the Bishop for the Knight. By doing this I also put this Bishop into jeopardy because there is nothing protecting it, so I might move up this Pawn here and then he will probably attack me here while the Pawn is good for pushing pieces back. When do you want to trade pieces? Well, there are different times to trade pieces and basically you don't want to move backwards so if you have a chance to trade pieces so you don't have to lose momentum by taking your pieces backward, that is one time to trade. Another time to trade is whenever you get ahead in the game. By keeping ahead by a Pawn, you can trade pieces down and still win the game. Another time to trade pieces is when your opponents is attacking you and he's got pieces matched up against you. By trading pieces you can weaken his attack. So there is 3 times to trade pieces. One, when you don't want to move backwards, two, when you have an advantage materially and you want to twiddle the game towards the end game or three, when the opponent is attacking you and you want to stunt his attack. Thank you. "