What is counterplay in chess?

Both players are attacking, in opposite directions, and neither is defending. This is a King’s Indian, and it is the clearest picture of counterplay there is: White’s pawns point at the queenside and he has just played c5, Black’s pawns point at the king and he answers with …g5.

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Black is not going to hold the queenside. He is not trying to. After 13…g5 14.cxd6 cxd6 15.Rc1 Ng6 the plan is …Rf7, …Bf8, …h5 and …g4, and both sides are counting tempi. Whoever gets there first wins, and there is no prize for second.

Passive defence loses slowly

Give a strong player a position where you have no threats at all and he will not blunder. He will improve one piece, then another, then push a pawn, and forty moves later something falls. That is the real argument for counterplay: not that it is more fun, but that a defender with no threats has to be perfect for the whole game, and nobody is.

So when you find yourself worse, the question is not “how do I hold this?” It is “where is my play?” The answer is usually the side of the board your pawns point at, and the move that gets you there is usually a pawn break.

What is not counterplay

Three things that feel active and are not. A string of checks that lead nowhere leaves your queen misplaced and his attack a move faster. Grabbing a pawn on b2 with the queen while he builds on the kingside is not counterplay, it is shopping. And a threat he can answer with a move he wanted to play anyway costs him nothing at all.

The test is simple. Does he have to stop what he is doing? If not, you have not created anything.

The eval bar is not the game

An engine will happily tell you that you stand at minus one, and beginners read that as lost. It is not. A position where you are half a pawn down with a break coming on the queenside is far easier to play than a dead level one with nothing to do, and the number says nothing about that. There is more on reading those figures under centipawns and engine evaluation.

If you want the two halves of this race drilled separately, work through some queenside attack puzzles and then the kingside ones, and notice how often the winning move in both is the one that ignores the other wing completely.