Author: Marc van Hal
Date: 20:53:03 10/06/99
>In the time Philidor said that the pawns are the soul (skeleton) of chess >I now say he was only partialy right. >I want to improve this statement by saying pawns and knight are the soul of >chess >After I made my setup for a chessmaster personelety I went up giving the knight >a higher valeu then the bischop. >with this reason that it will use his knight more often and also makes strong >squares for it >The Bischop only is stronger in the very end of the endgame but in all other >stages of the game the knight play a much bigger role in the game then the >bischop that means about 80% of the game the knight plays a bigger role >or you should play like a morphy stylist and brake open lines by doubeling pawns >only then the bischop plays a bigger role in the 100% of the game >but this is a hard style to folow and is very risky. >Just think about it. Something wich comes with giving a higher score ofcourse is that because you want strong fields for your knights includes you creating closed positions and a program only will folow these rules wich is only better then todays programs do I not only found this out with chessmaster setting but also in my deepest anelyzes it simply improves the positional understanding of the position it is not so that you ever will get an endgame on the board with 2 bischops and 2 knights most importanetly the knights will atack pawns in such a way that in these circumstanses you be glad to change one of your bischops for the atacking knights. the biggest diference in the settings I used for Chessmaster was giving knight 0.1 more then a bischop but in the mean time put the mobilety higher. And the improvement became that it played positionaly better and with real plans instead of only moves And like you did hear from your chess teacher a bad plan is better then no plan. By the way Kasparov's first lesson to beat computers was go to the end game cause computerprograms overrate the bischops. That the mobiletyof chessprograms must go higher is something all masters and grandmasters will agree on too. And I even think that Fritz5.16 preferd the knights too thats why he did want in many cases his knights on d5/d4 though d3 d6 even in some cases is even stronger then a rook cause it has a firm grip on the rooks. an other case where it is good to have given the knights a higher valeu also arises in the French game Where black has a bad bischop after d5 cause the bischop is locked in.
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