King Safety / Castling Test Suite?

[JVMerlino]

Does anybody have a test suite that convers King Safety and/or castling moves specifically?

Hopefully the positions will run the gamut of difficulty, but that's not a requirement.

Many thanks in advance,
jm

[bob]

Does anybody have a test suite that convers King Safety and/or castling moves specifically?

Hopefully the positions will run the gamut of difficulty, but that's not a requirement.

Many thanks in advance,
jm

This would be tough to do, but it would really be nice. Particularly to cover the usual GM advice "castle if you want to, or if you need to, but not just because you can..."

[Steve Maughan]

John,

You could try the Big Book of Combinations on my site:

http://www.stevemaughan.com/bbc.htm

Most involve king safety. The other suite I like is Jon Dart's suite.

Cheers,

Steve

[MattieShoes]

Haha but I've also seen the advice "If castling is good, it's better to do it NOW..." Though that may have been advice directed towards newer players. I suppose GMs should be able to see whether zwischenzug could prevent castling.

[bob]

Haha but I've also seen the advice "If castling is good, it's better to do it NOW..." Though that may have been advice directed towards newer players. I suppose GMs should be able to see whether zwischenzug could prevent castling.

From a lot of playing, I like the GM advice myself. Once you castle, you have planted a flag that says "attack me here, I can't move very far, very fast, so you know where to come..." The opposite end of that stick is the case where you wait too long, and then can't castle, and now you have planted a flag in the center that says the same thing. except is it much easier to attack down the center than on a flank.

My strategy is to try to tempt my opponent into preparing to attack on one side, before I castle to the other side, which gains a few moves for me. Computers are more problematic here and the horizon effect can be brutal with respect to castling. Basically if they castle at move 1 in the current search PV, or if it is move 15, they don't care. But if they keep pushing it off, suddenly they realize "Hey, I can't castle at all now" but it is too late to do anything about it.