Sometimes the most fun type of game is the type of game where you get to attack your opponent and your opponent having to defend all the attacks you are trying to make. One way to slowly press into your opponent’s comfort zone is by applying maximum pressure with the two bishops advantage. Well of course, you will have to first obtain to have the bishop pair where your opponent doesn’t. This happens when your opponent plays Bb4xc3 or Bg4xf3 after you have kicked the bishop with a3 or h3, known as the ‘kick move’. Other ways of getting to such positions come from playing Na4 when your opponent’s bishop is on c5, and they retreat to b6 and then Nxb6 and similarly on the right side of the board too with Nh4 and Nxg6. We will look at a few examples of how the bishop pair can dominate the board
The Power of the Diagonals.
Complete Domination: Two Bishops vs Two Knights, An Extreme Example
Suppose if you have two bishops and your opponent has two knights, then there are a lot of good things that can happen. This is because, bishops move quicker than knights and and attack/protect multiple squares on the chess board. The movement of knights are limited and is in a great disadvantage in open positions and even more so in positions where it is two bishops vs two knights.
Complete Domination.
The Double Bishop Sacrifice
Sometimes you will have a very strong influence over the diagonals directing to the enemy king like this:
White’s bishops represent a large threat towards the black king. This position came from the game between Judit Polgar (Former Women’s World Champion, considered the strongest female chess player in history) and Anatoly Karpov (Former World Champion, a master of positional and endgame techniques). Here Judit had a very good idea in mind and within the few moves, she forced Karpov to resign.
Keeping the Bishop Pair Alive
At some point the enemy will try break your bishop pair, in which, it would be nice if we can preserve the two bishop advantage by retreating it to a safe square. We will look at two examples where black tries to take capture one of white’s bishops and how white dealt with the situation.
Example 1:
Example 2:
That’s it from us for now. See you guys in the next article!
