Material Imbalance- Q v 8P

Knight v. Bishop is getting old- we need a new material imbalance for everyone to argue about (I mean, civilly discuss).

Which would you rather have: a queen or 8 pawns?

Depends on the position.

Queen if the minors are behind the pawns, the pawns if they are in front, and Bobby Fischer if it's half-and-half.

Houdini likes the Queen:

I think I'd usually prefer the pawns... but in the posted position black's pieces are too passive.  In any realistic game position it would be much more imbalanced... and of course one side would have no pawns at all. 

I think in the majority of cases this would mean either some passers will force material gain or an attack on the exposed king would force material gain.  For the queen to win there would have to be an immediate attack or weakness to exploit.

And I guess the less minors and heavy pieces are on the board, the more effective the queen becomes.  So in endgame like positions the queen would have a better chance of winning.

In my experience Pawns are totally slaughtered, when you pit them against nominally equal major material. Even 3 connected passers against a minor is badly lost, unless it happens very late in the game, (or the passers are highly advanced).

This is confirmed in the given position by having an engine play it out against itself. (I tried Fruit 2.1 vs. Fruit 2.1 and Fairy-Max 4.8 vs Fairy-Max 4.8.) In all 4 games the Queen won easily. Pawns cannot muster a dangerous attack on the King, as they cannot concentrate their power. Against a piece majority they are a liability rather than an asset.

Other interesting material imbalances I investigated are:

3Q vs 6N (1q1qk1q1/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/NNN1KNNN w - - 0 1): Queens win (as expected), but most engines cannot do it, and will lose with black.

3Q vs 7N (1q1qk1q1/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/NNNNKNNN w - - 0 1): Queens lose badly (unexpected!)

3R vs 5N (1r1rk1r1/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/N1NNKN1N w - - 0 1): nominally equal, but Knights win easily

4R vs 6N (1r1rk1r1/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/NNN1KNNN w - - 0 1): the Rooks stand no chance at all.

Note that some engines cannot play with Knights + Pawns > 10; for those you would have to set up a position with fewer Pawns on each side (e.g. 3 each), and make sure the position is tactically quiet (i.e. when the Q or R start on open files, they must not be able to capture unprotected Knights immediately). But that doesn't affect the results much.