While playing a chess game, the most important measure to protect your king is castling. There are certain situations where we castle on the opposite side to our opponent’s king.

There are quite a lot of openings that often lead to opposite side castling situations. For instance, the Sicilian Defense, Pirc and French Defense.

Now, here is a question for you – have you ever faced opposite side castling situations in your own games? Were you successful at it all the time?

Answering “Yes!” to the above question is not that easy! Because it is difficult to be successful at one thing always, unless you’re very well experienced with it and have 100% knowledge of it.

Opposite Side Castling

Playing opposite side castling middlegames is not an easy task. If you don’t play with a proper plan, your opponent may crush you in just a few moves.

This is because the main idea, when players castle on opposite sides, is TO ATTACK THE OPPONENT’S KING. So it’s something like, “If you don’t do it, he/she WILL.” To be more precise, it is a matter of “To kill or be killed!”

With the kings on opposite sides, we can often see that each player is trying to open files across to the enemy king. The most common method is to push pawns, because in the given situation it doesn’t weaken your own king.

Control over the centre plays an important role as well, as the side dominating in the centre can more easily increase his attacking chances or stop an opponent`s initiative.

But this is not all – a lot of other things have to be known while playing opposite side castling. So here is the BIG question for you – how to handle opposite side castling?

About the Author

GM Vadim Milov

Vadim Milov is a Swiss chess player who received the FIDE title of Grandmaster (GM) in 1993.

He played at the traditional GM Invitation tournament of Biel in 1996, co-winning with then reigning FIDE World Chess Champion Anatoly Karpov.

He won the Australian Open Chess Championship in 1999 and got first places at Aeroflot Open 2002, Santo Domingo 2003, Geneva 2004, the 2005 U.S. Open and Gibraltar 2009.

He also won the Corsica Masters International Rapid 2005 by defeating Viswanathan Anand in the finals.

In 2015 Milov won the Swiss Chess Championship and has played twice in Chess Olympiads.

He has a big training experience on different levels, from beginners to very top players.