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The bishop has a slender waist so it can slide between squares along diagonals. (Actually, I don’t really know why the bishop was designed like that, but that’s always how I’ve thought of it.) The bishop is called a minor piece because you can’t deliver checkmate with just a bishop and its king. Go ahead, set up a board and try it (you may want to check out Chapter 4 first). If you can do it, you’ll become world-famous, and I’ll include you in the next edition of this book.

Figure 2-4 shows the bishops and where they start on the chessboard.

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FIGURE 2-4: The bishops take their marks.

A bishop can move any number of squares, but only along the diagonals and until another piece gets in its way. If that piece is the opponent’s, the bishop can capture it, of course, by displacing it.

Figure 2-5a indicates some possible bishop moves. Unlike the rook (which I describe in the previous section), the attacking power of the bishop depends on where the piece is located on the chessboard and ultimately its mobility or scope, which is simply the number of squares it can move to. The bishop attacks more squares in the center, so it’s more powerful when positioned there. Unfortunately, it’s also more easily attacked there. You can see in Figure 2-5a that the bishop attacks 13 squares. How many squares does it attack in Figure 2-5b? (The correct answer is 9 – don’t count the square that it occupies.)

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FIGURE 2-5: The bishop attacks 13 squares and 9 squares, respectively.

You can tell by looking at the board that some diagonals are longer than others. The diagonals that cross the board’s center are longer than the ones that bisect the corners. Because the bishop doesn’t like hand-to-hand combat, players often position the bishop out of the way along a long diagonal, as in Figure 2-5b.

The bishop also has a unique natural restriction of its mobility: If it starts on a light square, it remains forever on the light squares, and if it begins the game on a dark square, it must always stay on dark squares. The bishop is color-bound by birth! Fully half the board is forbidden territory! For that reason, chess people speak of having “the two bishops.” In tandem, bishops can theoretically cover the entire board. However, they can never come to their comrade’s aid directly, and bishops on the same team can never compensate for each other’s loss.

This quality is so unusual that a special category in chess endings, called the opposite-color bishop ending, exists. This ending arises when each side remains with one bishop, but the bishops are on different-colored squares and are thereby sentenced to roam their own mutually exclusive halves of the board. Figure 2-6 illustrates this type of ending. These bishops are close to one another – they can get close enough to blow each other kisses – but never close enough to capture one another. (Flip to Chapter 15 for full details on chess endings.)

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FIGURE 2-6: The thoroughly unsatisfying opposite-color bishop ending.

The bishop, like the rook, can be blocked by its own army. In fact, the least desirable placement of the bishop is behind pawns of its own color: Pawns (which I discuss later in this chapter) are the least mobile of the chessmen and can render the bishop nearly powerless, as shown in Figure 2-7a. A bishop blocked behind its own pawns is often called a “bad bishop.” Enemy pawns can also restrict the bishop’s mobility, as in Figure 2-7b.

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FIGURE 2-7: The bishop, blocked by its own pawns and enemy pawns.

However, restricting a bishop with pawns isn’t always effective, because the bishop may be able to capture one of the enemy pawns. Just look at Figures 2-8a and 2-8b to see how (in chess notation, this move is written 1. Bxf3 – see Chapter 6 for details).

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FIGURE 2-8: The bishop pounces on a pawn.

If you plan on using your pawns to restrict a bishop’s mobility – which is a good thing to do, as long as you aren’t restricting your own bishops – you’d better make certain that the pawns are adequately defended!

Bishop moves are relatively easy to master, but their long-range attacking ability is often surprising. Many are the times when I’ve been shocked to see my opponent’s bishops spring from one corner of the board to the other. Just because your opponent’s bishops aren’t close to your pieces doesn’t mean they aren’t attacking you!

WHAT DO A BISHOP AND AN ELEPHANT HAVE IN COMMON?

The bishop evolved from the elephant, which may be difficult to imagine at first. Elephants don’t have slender waists, at least not the elephants I’ve seen. However, if you think about the ancient Indian soldier sitting atop an elephant and tossing down spears at the enemy, or if you visualize the medieval archer in a castle tower firing arrows down on a hapless foe, you can understand how this development came about. The bishop doesn’t like hand-to-hand fighting and is at its best when attacking from long range. If you think about it, would you rather be shooting arrows safely out of harm’s way or down in the trenches getting trampled? Archers weren’t stupid.

Why, then, is the piece called a bishop and not an archer? Oddly enough, it’s simply because the look of the carved piece resembled a bishop’s miter (the pointed hat that bishops wear) to medieval Europeans. What probably started as an off-hand remark soon became a custom.