The Screen Horses

The shape and why it holds

The system is named for its silhouette: two horses on the third and eighth files, screening the general like a folding screen. The geometry does the defending. Each horse guards the centre soldier - the one red’s cannon glares at - so the central threat is answered twice over; each horse also covers the square its partner would be attacked on. There is no single target for red to lever against, which is precisely what an attacking system hates most.

What makes the Screen Horses a system rather than a shape is the plan behind it: black completes the wall, spends one move on quiet insurance - an advisor rising behind the centre - and then strikes back at whichever wing red’s attack left thin. Play through the walkthrough and you can see the whole story in twelve moves: red charges, black finishes building, and the counterattack’s first move lands before red’s attack does.

A note of honesty: this is the defence professionals trust, and it asks more of you than the attack does. You will spend the opening under pressure, and the reward arrives ten moves later than it does for red. That trade - patience for soundness - is the whole bargain.

The Plum Flower Manual’s gift

The Central Cannon had the Ming dynasty; the Screen Horses got its revenge in the Qing. The Plum Flower Manual (Meihua Pu), compiled by Wang Zaiyue around the turn of the eighteenth century, is the defence’s founding document - game after game in which black’s paired horses absorb the classical attacks and the counterattack decides. Generations of players learned from it that the Central Cannon’s storm has a far shore.

The twentieth century turned the old manual’s claim into tournament fact. The great champions of the modern era - Yang Guanlin’s generation, then Hu Ronghua’s, then Lü Qin’s and Xu Yinchuan’s - all kept the Screen Horses as black’s main defence, and the sharpest theory in our whole archive lives in its variations. When a new red idea appears, the question asked of it is always the same: what does it do against the screen?

The model line, move by move

The first eight steps below are the same classical sequence you will meet in the Central Cannon guide - the two systems are one argument seen from two chairs. Watch what changes from step nine: where the attacker’s guide showed the crossing chariot invading, this line shows black calmly finishing the wall and preparing the reply.

The advisor’s quiet step up at move five of the walkthrough is the one beginners skip and masters never do. Notice how much of black’s later counterplay depends on the general being already safe.

What the defence is actually doing

Count defenders, not attackers. The screen’s centre soldier is guarded twice; the horses guard each other’s flanks; the advisor behind the centre makes the general’s file a dead end. Red’s threats look violent and keep bouncing off arithmetic - and every bounced threat is a tempo black banks. The defence’s whole theory of victory is that red’s initiative is a loan, and loans come due.

The second idea is the counterattack’s address. Red’s committed pieces - the crossing chariot especially - leave a wing thin, and black’s chariot-and-cannon battery aims there. In the model line it is the queenside; the edge cannon plus rising chariot is the standard machinery, and once it starts, black is not the defender any more.

Third: the screen bends rather than breaks. One horse can retreat and re-form; the soldiers in front can advance one square to blunt a file. What the shape cannot survive is being dismantled voluntarily - which is why most Screen Horses disasters are self-inflicted, a horse lured away from its partner by a soldier-sized bribe.

Plans for both sides

Black’s plan in order: complete the screen, insure the general, then counterattack the wing red’s initiative abandoned. The standard machinery is the edge cannon clearing the file, the chariot rising to chase red’s crossing chariot, and the queenside soldiers advancing to open lines just as black’s pieces arrive there. Black wins the games where every red threat cost red more than it cost black.

Red, from the other chair, has two honest tries against the wall: pile force against one horse faster than black can reinforce it - the crossing chariot pressing the queenside horse is exactly this - or use threats black must answer to win the centre soldier at a real discount, converting the opening into a favourable middlegame rather than a mating attack. Both are described from red’s side in the Central Cannon guide; the Five-Seven Cannons guide shows the sharpest modern version.

The move-ten diagram is worth a long look from black’s chair: nothing black owns is loose, and three black pieces are one move from activity. That 'coiled spring' quality is what you are trying to reproduce in your own games.

How the wall falls

Breaking the screen for a snack. A horse that leaves its partner to grab a river soldier undoes four moves of architecture for one point of material; red’s attack pours through the square the horse was covering. If a capture takes a screen horse past the river before move ten, the defence has usually already lost.

Skipping the insurance move. Without the advisor behind the centre soldier, red’s cannon and crossing chariot find forks and pins that simply do not exist in the correct setup. The move looks optional and is not; it is the difference between absorbing the attack and hoping it misses.

Counterattacking on schedule rather than on merit. The counterpunch works because it lands on a thin wing at the moment red is overcommitted - launched two moves early, it is just an under-defended raid, and red’s attack meets it head-on with more pieces. The screen buys you time; spend all of it.

Making it yours

Drill the model line in the Screen Horses lesson on Xiangqi Arena until the first ten moves need no thought, then do the one thing that actually teaches defence: play rated games as black and invite the Central Cannon. You will lose some while you learn what the pressure feels like; the archive’s masters lost those games too, once.

Study one collection deliberately: filter the archive for Screen Horses games that black won, and watch when the counterattack starts. The timing - never the moves themselves - is the skill.