Developing a sense for spotting bad pieces is essential for chess middlegame play. And once you do, embarrassing these pieces will be the easier part!
A large part of middlegame play is piece play. Knowing how to improve and optimize your pieces, how to centralize them, or make them effective as possible. Conversely, you also have to know what your opponent is doing to improve his.
Even though pawn structure and pawn moves will decide the nature of the position, moving pieces can create tactical chances and dynamic opportunities much more often.
Pieces are good or bad (or somewhere in the middle). Your first job is to be able to tell the difference and spot which pieces are bad. You can do that by simply following the general principles such as knights are best centralized, bishops require space and an open center, rooks need open files etc., but often the specifics of the position will determine the piece quality.
In time, your assessment of pieces will improve. The point is that once you see a piece you think is bad, and you know the reason for that assessment, you may find a way to prove that! Because if you don’t prove that it’s bad, than the assessment is theoretical only!
Just as with tactics, you would be surprised at what’s possible. Look at moves which seem absurd as well. If you try to make a tactic work, you must look at all the options. And trapping pieces is very similar.
So find a bad or bad looking piece and try to prove that! If you see an opportunity to restrain it further or trap it, great! If not, you will have still learned something and improved for the next opportunity you get.
I would advise you to train that by analyzing games of grandmasters and doing the same thing. Find a bad piece and think about why the strong player didn’t try to trap it. If he did try why did it work? Was there a defense? At what point did the trap become deadly? Answering these questions will make you more alert and faster!
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