Knight v Bishop (conclusions)

THIS series has looked at bishop-v-knight endings from my praxis that had equal pawns but did not end in draws.

There were none with eight pawns aside, and only one with one pawn aside, but that has been ignored as it arose with a mate-in-two on the board.

Here are the results of the other cases.

Pawns Aside........Knight Wins.....Bishop Wins

Seven                           9                        8

Six                               21                       7

Five                               7                       6

Four                               1                       5

Three                             3                       0

Two                                0                       2

Total:                            41                     28

The general wisdom has it that a bishop is more likely to outplay a knight when there are fewer pawns on the board.

At a glance it might be thought the results of this series fly in the face of this argument in that the knight won 59.4% of the games.

But that is largely because 84.1% of the positions began with 10 or more pawns on the board.

The knight's winning percentage in positions with 10 or more pawns is 63.8, which is almost identical to the bishop's winning percentage of 63.6 in positions with eight or fewer pawns.

Now 69 games do not constitute a large sample, but they do support the general wisdom that the more pawns there are, the happier is the situation, other things being equal, of the player with the knight.