Knowing how much damage piece activity can cause to the enemy position, it was only natural to try to fight against our opponent's potentially dangerous pieces. In the overall fight of a chess game, each piece and pawn plays an individual part, but sometimes we can identify "personal" duels between certain pieces. One interesting situation arises when the rival pieces share control over a series of squares. Let's take a simple case, with a white bishop on d5 and a black knight on d8.
( c'est la position du Diagramme 6 ) The critical squares are b7, c6, e6 and f7. Neither piece can use them, but the knight has no other squares available. The bishop is dominating the knight. One could argue that both pieces are immobile, because any bishop move would free the knight. But it is White who can choose the most favourable moment to end the domination and assign other missions to the bishop. Besides, from the central d5-square, the bishop keeps many other sectors of the board under observation, while the knight is merely passive.
In order to illustrate how relative this situation is, let's shift the position four ranks downwards and add new elements. It is easy to understand that the situation is completely reversed.
( c'est la position du Diagramme 9 ) ln practice, such patterns do not often occur in such a pure form. However, even partial and temporary domination can prove effective. Other pieces than the knight and the bishop can be involved, but the situations illustrated above are among the most typical.
I was pleasantly surprised when I realized that most of the examples from this chapter are taken from 1986, when I was ten years old. This makes me think that domination was something I understood from a very young age.
Judit POLGAR, "How I beat Fischer's record", "Quality Chess UK Ltd", Glasgow, 2012, page 104.