cats and dogs

i thought to write about this subject based on a discussion made today about the values of knights and bishops...i took it from Hans Berliner famous book THE SYSTEM (diff from my system of Nymzowisch)

Berliner says:

"in any basic book on chess you will find the values of the pieces as follows

pawn 1   knight  3  bishop 3  rook 5  queen 9

this is convinient in teaching a beginner, but lacks the kind of precission needed to make meaningfull decision...for example from the table we compute that a queen worth 3 minor pieces but grandmaster experience has shown that 3 minor pieces are almost always much superior to a queen. further more 2 minor pieces plus 2 pawns are almost always a good compensation for a queen....one must understand how to make decisions such as these in order to play high level of chess"

Berliner suggested the following table instead:

pawn 1.0  knight  3.2  bishop 3.33  rook 5.1 queen 8.8

he says " you really dont need to memorize the numbers , but u should be able to evaluate that 3 minor pieces are about equal to a queen + 1 pawn.....also 2 rooks are better than a queen + 1 pawn

however , circumstances can alter evaluations , according to pawn structure ...the straight line pieces gain up to 10% in value in wide open positions and lose around 20% in blocked positions...the knight can gain up to 50% in value in blocked positions and lose 30% in the corners and on edges

chess positions may be classified as ranging from wide-open,to open,to average, to closed, to blocked"