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Ideal Values and Practical Values (part 3). More on the value of Chess pieces.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

H. G. Muller wrote on Mon, Apr 18, 2011 08:57 PM UTC:

I am not sure I entirely follow your line of reasoning leading to the very small value of the 'triangulation' ability. And even if I would, it might not be valid, because piece values need not be strictly additive. (E.g. A Queen usually beats 2 Knights easily, but 3 Queens badly lose against 7 Knights, all the in presence of Pawns.)

The Wazir is indeed worth 130-140 centi-Pawn.

I should perhaps point out that I don't believe anything Betza claims here, unless empirical testing happens to show the same thing as he claims. For the simple reason that his statements are purely based on theoretical considerations that do not surpass the level of educated guessing, and his empirical testing, done in Human play, is not statistically significant. (As this would require tens of thousands of games.)

So it would not come as a big surprise to me if testing would show that color-switching has no significant impact on the value of a piece at all. An interesting test for this could for instance be to play augmented Knights against each other, which get a single extra King move, either orthogonal (preserving the color switching) or diagonal (breaking it), and then see which performs better, and by how much. (Or play Knights where one move is replaced by an Alfil or Dababba move against normal ones.)