Chess960: Queens in the Corner

Queens in the corner are a challenge. To make it a bit simpler, I gathered some statistics for queens in the corner with respect to adjacent knights. I did that because I think that the position of at least one knight with respect to the queen in the corner, forms the main theme of how the queen will develop. Why is that?

Take this combination:

When the knight develops we most likely get:

The point is that with a knight on c3, the queen in the corner is sheltered from her only main threat, fianchetto bishops on the long diagonal opposing the queen.

The other main combination that produces the same pattern is:

If you do the maths on these two patterns here are the results:
Number of positions with Q in corner (and it's mirror) = 240
Number of positions with QN or QxxN (and it's mirror) = 144
Therefore this theme occurs 60% of the time with queens in the corner.

Now if you take the other main theme of queens in the corner with respect to a knight:

If you do the maths on this pattern here are the results:
Number of positions with Q in corner (and it's mirror) = 240
Number of positions with QxN (and it's mirror) = 64
Therefore this theme occurs ~25% of the time with queens in the corner.

With so many things about Chess960, learning to play it comes down to working with the likelihood of certain start configurations turning up over the board. If you learn how to develop the queens in the corner with respect to only the three patterns above, you have covered  roughly 85% of all queens in the corner scenarios!


The suggestion is that knowing these three patterns will allow you to think more clearly about how to develop the queen in the corner horizontally or vertically because the structure of the knight and queen in the corner has a nice tension between protecting the queen but also impeding the queen.

Enjoy 960