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Aberg variation of Capablanca's Chess. Different setup and castling rules. (10x8, Cells: 80) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

H.G.Muller wrote on Wed, Apr 23, 2008 11:16 AM UTC:

All very true. But in practice, I never have seen piece values that were
extremely different in the opening from what the are in the end-game. The
rason is probably that in the beginning there are so many pieces that even
being one or two behind does not immediately decided the game by checkmate.
The opponent can almost always fight it off for a long time by trading
material. And by the time the board is half empty, most pieces start
approaching their end-game values. So if the disadvantage of two pieces
was only transient, the pieces being present, but merely useless on the
full board, he would effectively have earned them back.

In addition, pieces are seldomly totally useless. The Rook, which is the
most notorious example of a piece that is difficult to develop early,
still make itself very useful as a defender behind the Pawn line,
preventing your position to collapse under the attack of quickly developed
pieces of the enemy. It would perhaps be different if a CV had pieces that
by rule were not allowed to move at all before 75% of the Pawns had been
captured, but than suddenly became very powerful. For such pieces it would
be very questionable if you could survive long enough for them to be of
use. But with Rooks as defenders, you can realistically expect to survive
to the point where the Rooks live up to their full potential at least 90%
of the cases. R for N or B gambits are almost non-existent. It is very
questionable if the instantaneous advantage of having N in stead of R
would allow you to win a single Pawn before the advantage evaporates.

I did make an early end-game test on the Archbishop, though, because it
was the compound of two 'early' pieces, and some players suggested that
it had its main use in the early middle-game. So I set up a tactically
dead A+5P vs R+N+6P position (
http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/BotG08G/KA5PKRN6P.gif ), and let it play
a couple of hundred times to see who had the advantage. Turns out the
position was well balanced. This could be considered as a direct
measurement of the end-game value of the involved pieces.