why trade queens?

I remember when I first started playing chess online like 15 years ago, I was annoyed when an opponent traded queens. I asked "why would you do that, trade your best piece so early"?

He just answered "to win" 

I think if you want to preserve your queen you have to consider it during play and not give your opponent the option. 

I like to trade queens to minimize the potential damage from blundering it away.

If their queen is more active than mine, exchanging it will be best.. If not I will not trade.. Another thing, if the person you are paying is much higher rated, it's in your best interest to rid the queen of the board. 

You generally trade queens (or all your pieces) when you are in a position to convert into a winning endgame. It simplifies your game. I have recently won two games by doing this. I was up at least a pawn, and I simply traded down to win.

Terrible advice.

Actually the opposite is true.

Any equal position with queens off the board massively favours the stronger player because lower rated players are terrible at endgames.

The way to create chances against stronger players is to try to complicate things and make threats. If you trade off into a calm and maneuvering game you will just get outplayed. You'll play right into their hands.

Personallty, I don't want to trade Q's until I have an edge in material or position. If I fall, behind, having the Queen on the board lets me complicate the position/

Nice :-)

"... we can see from the above that players who are happy as White to play for a small edge in a queenless middlegame have a number of lines where they can achieve the sort of position they want. Even in other variations, the willingness to settle for a near-equal endgame, rather than trying to obtain an objective opening advantage, makes one's whole job of opening repertoire management very much easier. ... With his superb intuition and depth of positional understanding, [Petrosian] was accustomed to treating the opening relatively flippantly, and did not normally strive very hard to gain a theoretical advantage. ... it seems to me that for many players below master level, having a repertoire where there is minimal need to prepare could in fact be quite attractive. It must be remembered that, despite its shortcomings, Petrosian's approach proved good enough to wrest the world title out of the hands of Botvinnik, one of the best-prepared players ever. ..." - FM Steve Giddins (2003)

It is just something you pick up as you improve, you don't trade queens unless you have a reason. You either get a piece advantage or a superior position before a trade.

probably because last game they met someone who used their queen like every move and they lost to them :/

You mean like e.g.

White just forwent on their castling rights, and the eval bar gives this position -1.44.

Similar play but white gets to keep castling rights, eval bar says -0.5, so not a massive advantage for black, but still an advantage.

Let's say no queens were harmed in the making of this opening and both sides decide to shield the queen with the bishop (eval next to the moves)

Black should of course take the pawn (giving roughly the same advantage as in the second example), but clearly the engine likes the early queen trade. After dxe5 Qxd1+ is the top engine move (with or without loss of castling rights for white). Out of the top 3 moves the engine gives it's the only one giving an advantage to black.

Even for white

After Kxd8 this is +0.98, Qxd8+ was the top engine move again, the other two are 0.00.

Don't argue with the engine lol.

But apart from knowing that it's the best move, I find that it greatly simplifies the game. I don't need the queen to win, but the opponent's queen might become very dangerous later on (or at least annoying), so if I can take out that potential danger early, why not?
Also a lot of people seem to be overly attached to their queens, so it's a psychological blow to them as well (the fact you made a thread about it kind of like says that it bothers you).

Seems like enough reasons to do it.

Often it's because they don't like being attacked, and want to get to the endgame as fast as possible.