Norway Chess R8: To exchange, or not to exchange?
Chess is a brutal game. After hours of struggling, clever thought and great moves it all often comes down to one critical moment, where the decision you make will determine whether your previous hard work will pay off, or go to waste.
One of the most common dilemmas is whether you should keep your pieces on the board, or not. Is it better for you to just proceed with your middle game, or could you actually benefit from going into an endgame? When deciding on this, it can be uttermost helpful to know about some common situations and their usual outcome.
This game serves as a very good example to why one should be extremely careful when simplifying the position into an endgame - no matter how promising it might look. Especially endgames like this, here you will have pawns trying to be promoted on squares that your bishop do not cover.
Anyway: In the annotations I promised a link to my piece on opposition, which also is a relevant theme to the "exhange, or not exchange"-dilemma. You can find it here.
