Outpost question

Any time I have an outpost available (e.g. in a Stonewall kind structure) I wonder if I should place my knight there if it can be taken by another minor piece (enemy knight or bishop) afterwards (then, I would retake with a pawn). Is there any rule of a thumb to decide on in such cases?

Thank you very much. It is roughly what I was worrying about (I was just imagining a board after a possible exchange and it didn't look well).

The first rule of thumb in chess is all the rules of thumb break down under certain circumstances, except one - if your goose has been cooked, resign immediately. That rule is sacred. Anyway, the point is, you have to have a lot of thumbs with a lot of associated rules to inform and balance out the other rules of thumb. All the rules of thumb are constantly jockeying in the chess player's mind to be the dominant rule of thumb of the moment, as a rule, but not always, as per caveat rule of thumb #2023. Therefore, my advise to you is see if you can get personalized lessons from Magnus Carlsen, but of course that is unlikely. Alternatively, Fiveofswords is very smart. If you can't get advice from Mangus, I would see if Fiveofswords can tutor you.

getting another pawn towards the center surely can't be wrong ;)

I think it depends on the case at hand. In stonewall structure, there are usually a couple of reasons why Ne5/Ne4 is rather good :

- in case of NxN you get a useful semi-open f-file + some space

- the N you put on the outpost may be in the way of the other Knight,

- if your opponent doesn't take and you can solidify the outpost, it becomes pretty strong (but I know this wasn't your pquestion in the first place)