<>The Safe Check method seems like a rather hard way to figure the strength and power of >each piece. Why not just compare how many squares each piece can cover in one move? >Obviously some of the piece's positions when doing the counting will have a great impact >on the total, but some sort of average can be figured into it.

Doing this we have:

Chancellor= 1720
Queen= 1672
Rook= 1280
ArchBishop= 832
Knight= 440
Bishop= 392

So we see that something is wrong. A bishop can't be weaker than Knight. What is wrong?
It's the method, that underestimates many things. Of course safe check method has it's weak parts too, but it seems it is a better estimator for the piece values.

But a very hard question is what really is a piece's value? How we should define the "piece value"? What's the meaning behind this? Can anyone find a good definition of the piece value?


>It seems like the value that is assigned in regular Chess should be adjusted to the game >situation. That's what I do when deciding to make a trade or not. Sometimes a well placed >Knight is worth almost a Rook.

Deep Junior 8.0 knows this well, after the game with Kasparov:-)
Here it played Rae8?!:
r4rk1/pb1n1ppp/2qN4/4p1Pn/2p1P3/2Q1BN2/P
P3P1P/2KR3R b - - 0 17

>Especially when the position is blocked with lots of Pawns and both sides have a >Bishop to keep the Pawns guarded.