A Bishop is stronger then a Knight !

knight-3 bishop-3 the opening matters too .catlen- bishop 

Chigorin likes the knight. :D

Anyone who replies with "it depends on the position" is wrong. 

Objectively, a bishop is worth more than a knight because most positions are more open than they are closed. Similarly, a queen is worth more than a knight because it is more useful in most positions. Again, a rook is better than a knight because it dominates in the majority of positions. 

Knights can be better than knights, queens or rooks if they allow the player to gain a clear advantage. However, this is rare. Therefore, we say that queens are better than rooks, rooks are better than bishops, and bishops are better than knights. It's called relative piece value. Keep in mind that this relative piece value is based on the general usefulness of a piece, rather than its power on a balnk board. 

I once had a chess system which rated a bishop one point higher than a knight. Knights are very good when you are dealing with centralized attacks using pawns, one knight is almost certainly not very helpful near the end of the game, whilst two knights can be quite useful if they are in synch with each other... however, Bishops are far superior when say for instance, you want to diagonalize your attacks on the side which your opponent has castled. Knights and Bishops are handy together mind you, such moves like the Fried Liver attack comes to mind.

And I'm sure people will put a lot of weight in your guesswork compared to proper statistical analysis Tornado.

However, a bad thing about Bishops, is that if you only have one, it is quite easy at the end game to keep your pieces from being on the coloured square that this bishop occupies... this is why single Bishops and single Knights can be quite redundant... it makes all the difference if you have two. This is one reason why I don't personally agree with pinning a knight down with your bishop very near the beginning of the game, because 8-10 times you will end up taking the knight, and you will leave yourself short of a bishop... and then you are left with the duty of trying to keep both your knights, which is not an easy task very early on due to pawn structures.

AndyClifton wrote:

Okay, I will...from memory as best I can.  Actually, bishop and knight are as equal as two such disparate pieces can be (although their moves are not entirely dissimilar, since the knight's influence does describe little diagonal arcs).  It is a truism that bishops are favorable in open positions, whereas knights like for it to be closed.  That said, there are two reasons why positions tend to be better-suited to bishops:

1)  The game starts out wide-open.  Indeed, it takes quite a bit of doing to close it up, and the simple truth is that most chess positions are open.

2)  Closed positions tend to get clogged up (and drawish) more easily than open ones.  There is less play in them, and even though they may favor the knights, none of the other pieces will be well-served by such situations.  Then too at some point if you aim to win you're probably going to have to open up the position a bit, thus giving new life to the bishops (at least for a few moves).

Still, the importance of this open/closed dichotomy can be exaggerated.  One of the things I was surprised about in going through a collection of Spassky's games was how often he used a knight to advantage even in open positions (as long as he had a central outpost, he was doing fine).  And Karpov also seemed rather adept at handling the hoppers with open lines.

I wonder if perhaps that era was a more knight centric time? I saw an article of Bobby Fischer in a chess magazine entitled, " Bobby Fischer can beat you withou his bishops". I can't help but wonder why he made it a priority to be able to do so, or if bishops are superior, why then do some players still favor knights?

It would be absurd to suggest a player as good as Fischer was bias toward one set of minor pieces over another, and did not in fact exchange pieces based on the analysis of individual positions.  I can't imagine any decent player, much less Fischer, sitting over a board thinking "this position looks good for me, but I prefer knights, so I need to find a way to trade off my bishops."

I think a player as good as Fischer could perhaps choose how he wanted to beat you... I wouldn't be surprised with his arrogance/confidence, he would make it a point beat someone with knights if they claimed bishops were superior, to not only maybe make you second guess yourself, but to help you realize the superiority of the player's skill using them is perhaps the determining factor to which is better in a game.

@ Zen master.....I get my arse kicked by them both equally...so that is deciding factor for me....

I don't think chess positions are as flexible as you think they are :) ... at least at the GM level.  Fischer could beat me any way he wanted, sure.

yeah,I meant that somewhat losely, but certainly if anyone could take advantage of the full flexibility of theory to impose his will, it was Fischer....

I think those examples where Fischer ziged when they expected him to zag was something of the opposite scenario.  The other GMs were using generalizations e.g. "theory tells me a bishop is useful here" while Fischer's analysis had found the truth of the position "I know a bishop looks good here, but I have found the truth in this position, and the knight plays a key role"

All in all. Bishop is stronger then a knight because:
-It can control more squares
- Easier to open up a position, than to close down.
- It is easier to exhange the bishop for the knight, then the knight for the bishop. (If you need to do this) But of course, if your opponent can close the position, then bishop becomes almost useless, and the knight will be a very good piece.
So if you have more bishops, you have to open up the position, if you have more knights, then you have to close down the position.

Knights may actually be better in fairly open positions, perhaps with a few pawns to help make outposts. The problem is that the bishops absolutely love open positions.

In other words, it could be argued that knights only prefer closed positions not because they fundamentally function better than knights do in open ones, but because they can make do with a closed position better than a bishop can. Closed positions almost always make it harder to find squares because they are often clogged by pawns, but knights often don't complain as much as bishops because they can usually still find somewhere to go.

waffllemaster wrote:

I think those examples where Fischer ziged when they expected him to zag was something of the opposite scenario.  The other GMs were using generalizations e.g. "theory tells me a bishop is useful here" while Fischer's analysis had found the truth of the position "I know a bishop looks good here, but I have found the truth in this position, and the knight plays a key role"

Probably like me, Fischer grew tired of the half truths he'd discovered hearing as he grew,so once he realized he could fit a square peg in a round hole if it we small enough. Unlike me though, when others expectedhim to do that, he would certainly find a way to make the hole big enough to fit what ever square peg he had to work with, chessically speaking of course. I wish I could figure out how to do that...

It depends on the player, some people have more stratagies involving one rather than the other. The knight is cirtainly unique in it's move possibilities, but the bishop fairs better for long distance. I personally think that it's the player that determines the effictiveness of any piece on the board.

Well they are of equal value but i think a bishop is preferable because it is easier to use than manouvering a knight

After reading the first line i came to one conclusion!

Your wrong about being right and right about being wrong. And i am confused in your 3rd paragraph "Knights are better than knights..." Go get some rest clearly you have been playing here for consecutive hours and tired.

Your right, from Judith comments and etc. This sums up everything in short version. I left a comment that was the long version but i like this much better. Easy to remember to apply to a game. Should be in a book or posted as an article on this site.