Piece Value and Minor and Major Pieces
In the last blog-post, we learned how the pieces move. Now, we will take a quick look at what each piece is worth and what the minor and major pieces are.
As we learned last time, there are 6 pieces in chess. Each of them is said to have a value, and below is what they are valued at:
Rook: 5 points
Bishop: 3 points
Queen: 9 points
Knight: 3 points
King: Infinite points
Pawn: 1 point
You may be wondering why the king is worth infinite points when it can only move one square at a time. This is because the goal of chess is to checkmate your opponent’s king. Even if you have all the pieces on the board, if your opponent checkmates you with just one piece, then it does not matter that you had all of those pieces because you have lost the game. Take a look at the below position. Though black has much more pieces than white and so, much more points than white, he still lost because his king got checkmated by the white bishop.
White has won the game though he only has 14 points of pieces while black has 28 points of pieces, double of white’s points.
That is why the king is the most valued piece; it doesn’t matter how many pieces you have if you get checkmated. As in the above example, you could have all the pieces on the board while your opponent has just 5, but if they checkmate you, they will win the game.
The reason why we use the above values is so that when you play, you do not make bad trades. What does this mean? In chess, all pieces can capture opponent pieces. If you capture your opponents pawn with a rook, then that is not good for you. This is because the pawn is worth only 1 point while the rook is worth 5 points. This means that you made a bad trade because you gave more points for less points.
Minor and Major Pieces
So what are minor and major pieces? Simply put, minor pieces are just the knight and bishop while major pieces are just the rook and queen. Minor means small and knights and bishops have small point values. Major means large and the rooks and queen have large point values.
So why does this matter? We’ll take a look at that in the next blog-post.
Author: Saharsh Satheesh
