Hacker News Reader

Comment by rauljara | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, two rooks for a queen being a disadvantage is kind of a relief.

I’ve always been taught the two rooks are better and who can argue with 5 + 5 > 9? But also, I’ve also lost almost every game where I’ve had the rooks. I always thought that I just needed to be a better player to take advantage of it. Glad to know it wasn’t just me.

Just goes to show that these shortcuts, like the point system, are only heuristics, and pretty shallow ones at that. Knowing that being up a bishop gives you slightly more of an advantage than a knight is better than nothing. But learning in which sorts of positions a knight is actually better than a bishop will give you a much deeper understanding (and correspondingly more wins).

View on HN

Yeah, agreed. 2 rooks vs queen is much easier to play for the queen in most cases, I've found.

The queen can be good as a single piece whereas the rooks have to coordinate, which is hard when there's a queen on the board ready to fork. Often the rooks end up having to defend eachother, and if this happens suboptimally they can become very immobilised on a useless file or rank whereas the queen can fly around the board attacking stuff at will.

Like you said, material imbalance is very difficult to evaluate and understand. I generally recommend not to incorporate them into one's play until ~1700 FIDE elo. Though sometimes you're forced into it of course.

It's also a matter of style. I personally love materially imbalanced positions, and I'm pretty good at them, so I incorporate a fair bit of exchange sacrifices into my play. Because then I often get positions I understand better than my opponent and that makes up for the material on its own, I find.

But other players just prefer a different style of play and maybe shouldn't go for it even if objectively it's the best move, because they'll end up misplaying the position.

As someone low in rating, there are few things in chess more satisfying to me than when the engine confirms I was correct in sacrificing an exchange or a full piece for some sort of positional advantage. The opportunity itself comes up very rarely for me, so recognizing it just makes me giddy.

Yeah, there's nothing that feels better in chess than that. I still remember my first win in the norwegian championships(in the noob category, not bragging, they let anyone play in it) almost 20 years ago(yikes); found, correctly calculated and played a rook sacrifice leading to mate(it was like a 3 move combination, all checks, nothing too fancy but I did consciously threaten it the move before). I also remember walking into mate in 1 in another game that tournament, the rest is a blur.

And in fact most of the wins I remember the most clearly involved some kind of well-found sacrifice. The others tend to blend together too much in my mind. And most of the losses I remember most clearly involved horrible blunders.

edit: my comment was silly, removed.

I don't think being up a full piece counts as material imbalance.

You are absolutely right, I deleted my comment as it was misleading.

The author doesn't list which time control he studied (maybe a mishmash of bullet, blitz and rapid?), but I'm thinking that shorter time controls favor the queen.

The pieces definitely vary in value by position. Chess engines that people have no chances of beating will occasionally sacrifice a rook to take an enemy knight on a good outpost square (past ability to get attacked by enemy pawns and attacking enemy space). Hard to argue they don't know what they're doing when they can beat all humans.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com