GM Jacob Aagaard - A Deep Dive into Strategic Decision-Making

Yes, so...

What our main advice is you want to exchange bad pieces for good pieces.

You don't want to exchange good pieces for bad pieces.

Again, this is like cutting away the noise.

What is the simple thing we see in this position is we see that the points are in dark squares.

And that means that this here.

Is not the good bishop.

It's a bad bishop in principle.

Now in some positions, this bishop being gone and we have a long open diagonal,

then it could be a good bishop.

Or we

have bishop against knight with pawns on both sides.

It can become a very different experience.

As a knight of play, you will know this.

Yes,

yes.

But we're very far from such a reality.

What we have here is very simple.

This is the good bishop, and this is the bad bishop.

That's right.

This is our good bishop.

This is the bad bishop.

So you saw with d5, we ended up with bad bishop against good bishop.

That's right.

And even though If we ignore the tactical aspect, it was maybe only 0.5, something small to medium advantage for white.