Understanding Minor Piece Imbalances: The Bishop Pair
In this third part of "Understanding Minor Piece Imbalances", I present you a few tips to help you use the bishop pair effectively and appreciate its value. I will be making references to some of the points discussed in parts one and two of this series, so do check it out if you haven't already.
This article will cover three techniques - how to use the bishop pair, preserve it, and create/prevent counterplay.
Using the bishop pair
A single bishop is often already worth well more than a knight in an open position. Nevertheless, the side playing with the knight can attempt to work around or against that lone bishop. For example, he can put all his pawns on the opposite colour to deprive the bishop of any targets, or in some cases, put all his pawns on the same colour to limit the bishop's scope.
But if we have two bishops in an open position, they would be absolute monsters. Their enemy will have nowhere to hide. This can be seen from a beautiful exchange sacrifice in an ending played by the legendary Savielly Tartakower against Reginald Pryce Michell.
Preserving the bishop pair
"It is generally reckoned that in the majority of cases two bishops are stronger than two other minor pieces. But while in the middlegame the advantage of the two bishops is by no means always an important factor, in the endgame it is often decisive." -M. I. Shereshevsky
This explains why masters sometimes preserve their bishop pair in the middlegame even at the cost of making them seemingly less active. A classic example can be seen from Botvinnik's 13th move in his match against Bernstein. With that move, he blocked his own bishop in order to keep the bishop pair. Subsequently, Botvinnik headed for an ending where his advantage was magnified.
Creating/preventing counterplay
Knights are only able to affect square in their immediate vicinity. Therefore, they are most effective at exploiting central weak squares or holes (as established in part 2). In order to prevent counterplay when we possess the two bishops, we would need to use pawns to push the knights back as much as possible, keeping them out of play. At the same time, we would need to minimise the number of weaknesses created.
In order to illustrate the battle between the minor pieces best, I have selected an ending where the imbalance was two black bishops against two white knights. The advantage is clearly with the former, but black should still be credited for how he did all that was described in the previous paragraph.
From this game we can see how Tarrasch kept the knights at bay by carefully pushing his pawns, creating little to no weaknesses. An additional observation is that rook pawns are best for this task as they lose control over fewer squares when pushed compared to their central counterparts. On top of that, the squares weakened would be on a knight's file which, ironically, is often not ideal for a knight to exploit 
This concludes my mini-series on minor piece imbalances. If you have any questions, feel free to leave it in the comments. Have a great day ahead!
P.S. Some of the ideas and examples used in this article were drawn from M. I. Shereshevsky's book, Endgame Strategy. It covers various concepts in the ending very well and I would highly recommend it for those rated at the club level and above.
