In chess, is it generally better to....?

Question

have two bishops, two knights, or one of each left?

After trading and all that.

Are there matchups like

Knight and Bishop trump Knight and Knight or is it just set in stone?

Answer 1

That's a difficult question.  Some of it depends on what your current position is on the board.  Bishops have more mobility but knights are trickier.  I like the bishop/knight combination and the bishop/bishop combination equally.

Answer 2

Generally (it dipendes on the position) 2 Bishops are better, because of their range, but 2 Bishops vs 2 Bishops are probably going to draw.

Answer 3

yes it is.

Answer 4

Though both pieces are considered to be worth about three pawns, Bishops are considered to be slightly slightly better than the knight because they are very useful in endgames, where they can shoot across the board, where a knight takes longer to move.

One way to judge which is better is the pawn structure of a game. When the pawn structure is open and airy, with available ranks, files, and diagonals, bishops are much better. This is for the obvious reason of their long range.

Knights, however, function much better in closed games, where the pawn structure is tightly wrapped together and other pieces can't move around all that much.

Though this is a little outside the scope of your question, pawn structure also tells which bishop it is good to have with the bishop knight tandem. If your own pawns are on the same color squares as your bishop, and your opponents pawns are on the opposite color, that bishop is bad (good thing you'd have the knight to balance it out). But if your pawns are on a different color square from your bishop and your opponent has pawns on the same color square as the bishop, that bishop is good. So, this, too, could help you decide in keeping a certain bishop or a knight.

Answer 5

Having the two bishops is generally considered an advantage (because they have more range than the knights and are able to hit all the squares on the board--one disadvantage to a single bishop being that it only operates on squares of one color).  But it does very much depend on the position.  Generally blocked positions (where pawn chains are locked together) will favor the knights; probably one reason that bishops tend to be valued higher is that it's more common to have open positions than blocked ones.  The American grandmaster Reshevsky believed that generally two knights were stronger than a bishop and knight.

Another way to compare the piece groupings is to examine them working by themselves.  Two bishops will easily checkmate a lone king; bishop and knight can do it, but it's a protracted process.  With two knights checkmate, although possible, can never be forced.

Answer 6

Hi,

     You may like to visit my web page - link below?  See 'KNIGHT' and 'BISHOP'.  I hope this is helpful for you.

Yours,

Chesmayne.