Battery

Home * Chess * Tactics * Battery



A Battery in chess is a formation of two or more sliding pieces with common attacking directions along the same rank, file, or diagonal. Their attacks conjoin on one or more target squares in one ray-direction, attacked at least once directly, and one or more times indirectly. A battery is a chess tactics related term, often motivated by strategic pawn structure related considerations. In the middlegame, a (rook) battery attacking a weak opponent pawn on a half-open file is a common motive. The German chess term Drucksäule (tower of strength) refers to own, apparently weak pawn support from its rearspan, to force a lever and pawn exchange to (half-) open a file.

=Evaluation Considerations= Like other X-ray related tactics, considering batteries may be subject of king safety terms and static exchange evaluation. A standard pattern in mate at a glance is a battery of bishop / queen or rooks / queen, where the queen attacks a square or opponent piece adjacent to the opponent king, exclusively defended.

Whether a (rook-) battery deserves a general bonus in evaluation is debatable, assuming there are already singular bonuses for occupying open- or half-open files or the seventh rank respectively. Larry Kaufman even proposed a rook-pair penalty with respect to a bishop pair : In my opinion, another reason is that any other pair of pieces suffers from redundancy. Two knights, two rooks, bishop and knight, or major plus minor piece are all capable of guarding the same squares, and therefore there is apt to be some duplication of function.

With two bishops traveling on opposite colored squares there is no possibility of any duplication of function. So, in theory, rather than giving a bonus to two bishops, we should penalize every other combination of pieces, but it is obviously much easier to reward the bishop pair.

=See also=
 * Discovered Attack
 * Discovered Check
 * Pin
 * Sliding Piece Attacks
 * SEE - The Swap Algorithm
 * Skewer
 * Static Exchange Evaluation
 * X-ray
 * X-ray Attacks (Bitboards)

=External Links=
 * Battery (chess) from Wikipedia
 * Alekhine's gun from Wikipedia
 * Battery from Wikipedia
 * Zbigniew Seifert - Impressions (John Coltrane), from Kilimanjaro, live at Club Pod Jaszczurami, Kraków, November, 14, 1978, YouTube Video
 * feat. Mieczysław Górka, Janusz Grzywacz, Jarosław Śmietana, Zbigniew Wegehaupt


 * Anthony Braxton - Impressions (John Coltrane), Woodstock Jazz Festival,1981, YouTube Video
 * feat. Miroslav Vitouš, Jack DeJohnette, Chick Corea

=References=

Up one Level