In chess, the chess piece relative value system conventionally assigns a point value to each piece when assessing its relative strength in potential exchanges. These values help determine how valuable a piece is strategically. They play no formal role in the game but are useful to players, and are also used in computer chess to help the computer evaluate positions.
Calculations of the value of pieces provide only a rough idea of the state of play. The exact piece values will depend on the game situation, and can differ considerably from those given here. In some positions, a well-placed piece might be much more valuable than indicated by heuristics, while a badly-placed piece may be completely trapped and, thus, almost worthless.
Valuations almost always assign the value 1 point to pawns (typically as the average value of a pawn in the starting position). Computer programs often represent the values of pieces and positions in terms of 'centipawns'(cp), where 100 cp = 1 pawn, which allows strategic features of the position, worth less than a single pawn, to be evaluated without requiring fractions.
Edward Lasker said "It is difficult to compare the relative value of different pieces, as so much depends on the peculiarities of the position...". Nevertheless, he said that bishops and knights (minor pieces) were equal, rooks are worth a minor piece plus one or two pawns, and a queen is worth three minor pieces or two rooks (Lasker 1915:11).
Read more about Chess Piece Relative Value: Standard Valuations, Alternate Valuations, Changing Valuations in The Endgame, Shortcomings of The System
Famous quotes containing the words chess piece, chess, piece and/or relative:
“The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem.... I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.”
—Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968)
“It’s a great huge game of chess that’s being played—all over the world—if this is the world at all, you know. Oh, what fun it is! How I wish I was one of them! I wouldn’t mind being a Pawn, if only I might join—though of course I should like to be a Queen, best.”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“A flow’ret crushed in the bud,
A nameless piece of Babyhood,
Was in her cradle-coffin lying;
Extinct, with scarce the sense of dying:”
—Charles Lamb (1775–1834)
“Excellence or virtue is a settled disposition of the mind that determines our choice of actions and emotions and consists essentially in observing the mean relative to us ... a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)