A good player exchanges or sacrifices for position also.

good.the idea is not clear the on first look!

well..the defender shuld exchange his unhelfull pieces for the atakr's active pieces.

thats the best thing u shuld do if u r in a defensive position.

but if ur oponent has 2 or so moves checkm8 ...stop thinking about it and exchange!

great article and nic puzle :)

[i was trying 30 min to solve it :S]

menofsticks: lets say material is even and exchanging would not bring you a positional advantage, but your opponent is putting preasure on you. In this case you try to exchange to simplify things. Or lets say you have the attack and you have more attackers then your opponent has deffenders, you would might want to exchange your minor pieces...

It ultimatly depends on the position of course.

I agree with menofsticks, but i like to play with all the pieces on the board. For me there is nothing better then putting my opponent in mate using 4 or 5 pieces. That's why i play holdem chess at http://pawnshark.com/ .

menofsticks, your basic premise is right, but in the case of an attack, kenytiger has the opinion of grandmasters behind him.

I'm not sure I agree with exchaging pieces in the general case.  Take, for instance, the case where you and your opponent have exactly the same material.  If all you do is exchange pieces, neither player ever has the advantage of material, and while you are smplifying the position for yourself, so too are you simplifying the playing field for your opponent.   In this case, it seems to me, that simplification only works if you are gaining a positional advantage at the same time.

 On the other hand, say that you are up a bishop and you and your opponent swap material until there are no more peices to exchange.  You have one piece remaining (the bishop) while your opponent has no pieces at all.  You clearly have the advantage of material modulo whatever pawns are left and whatever pawn stucture you have managed to maintain.  This is clearly an extreme example, but you get my point.

 So, in the first case I don't think that simplification is necessarily a good thing.  However, if you can manage the second case, then you clearly should simplify if possible.

 Please blow holes in my argument if I'm wrong :)

thanks, kt .. good one

Again the weakness of base-line (first row) but now the Black Queen shooted the goal. Let's count the pieces! The final result is 3-2.

 I doubt you checked this position with a good chess engine, something I ALWAYS do.  Mr. Reinfeld lived and wrote before they were available and his books suffer from that.  Rybka found f6 for Black a few seconds after Qxd1.  It is clearly a better move as it leads to more forced exchanges more quickly.  Check it out.

Very good post, thanx...

Yes... exchanging pieces can be very useful in defeating an opponent!

Thanks for the reminder and the puzzle!

Great advice! Go for the exchange, and the example is brilliant.

Bravoo!!!

Hmmm very good. A great egsample mate....

very true... Im amazed how their are so many people who havn't picked up this basic concept. to often i play people who exchange pieces when their down, making this less complicated for me...

Astonishing move!!!

wow