Gaining Material
When one player is able to capture an opponent's piece or pieces without losing any of his own, that player is said to have won material; that is, the opponent will have fewer pieces on the board. The goal of each basic tactic is to win material. At the professional level, often the mere threat of material loss (i.e., an anticipated tactic) induces a player to pursue an alternative line. In amateur games, however, tactics often come to full fruition, as they are not foreseen by the opponent and so result in material gain and a corresponding, perhaps decisive, advantage. Material gain can be accomplished by several different types of tactics.
Read more about this topic: Chess Tactic
Famous quotes containing the words gaining and/or material:
“More than ten million women march to work every morning side by side with the men. Steadily the importance of women is gaining not only in the routine tasks of industry but in executive responsibility. I include also the woman who stays at home as the guardian of the welfare of the family. She is a partner in the job and wages. Women constitute a part of our industrial achievement.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons—reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.”
—Terry Eagleton (b. 1943)