Bishop Pair

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Since in the initial position bishops stand on the squares of different color, throughout the game they control a disjoint sets of squares. This means that their power will never be wasted for carrying out the same tasks. On the other hand, lack of one bishop may introduce a color weakness. Taking all those considerations into account, one might conclude that possessing both bishops is a desirable thing. The question is, however, how much they are worth.

Larry Kaufman proposed the value of half a pawn . It must be stressed, however, that this number is a part of a broader system, in which knights are stronger with many pawns on the board.

See also

• Bishop versus Knight
• Material

Publications

• Gennady Timoshchenko (1993). Bishop or Knight? ICCA Journal, Vol. 16, No. 4
• Mark Sturman (1995). Beware The Bishop Pair. Computer Chess Reports, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp.58
• Mark Sturman (1996). Beware the Bishop Pair. ICCA Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2
• Larry Kaufman (1999). The Evaluation of Material Imbalances. (first published in Chess Life March 1999, online version edited by Dan Heisman)

Forum Posts

• Question about Crafty and Bishop Pair by Renze Steenhuisen, CCC, July 13, 2004 » Crafty
• Testing of Kaufman Material Values by Mark Lefler, CCC, April 25, 2009 » Material
• Rook Pair Penalty, Knight Pair Penalty, Having a Pawn Bonus by Mark Lefler, CCC, May 11, 2009
• Bishop vs. Knight | abrok.eu by Roman Korba, September 1, 2019
• A more generic Bishop evaluation by apospa..., FishCooking, May 25, 2020

External Links

• Bishop pair from Wikipedia
• Chess game data mining: exploring the advantage of the bishop pair with pgn-extract by David J. Barnes, kentdjb, October 14, 2018 » pgn-extract

References

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