The Bishop

The Bishop

The bishop is one of the pieces of chess . With respect to your movements, you can advance or backward diagonally across all the free spaces. It should be remembered that chess is a game whose games are disputed on a board divided into sixty-four squares or squares.

Chess faces two players. Each one receives sixteen pieces : among them, two bishops. The bishop can not move forward or backward in a vertical direction, nor for the sides in a horizontal direction. Its displacement always develops diagonally, either upwards or downwards.

By their movements, the bishops remain the entire game in the same color as the game in which they started , a feature that, although it may seem superficial, distinguishes them from the rest of the pieces. That is to say: if a bishop is located in the white box, he can not go to a dark box at any time.

Another characteristic of the movement of the bishops that we must take into account is that they can not skip pieces, but, when encountering a rival piece, it takes its place and captures it. In fact, the only one capable of jumping over other pieces is the horse.

Historians tell us that, in the ancient games that preceded the development of chess, bishops did not exist. The piece was added in the 12th century , when chess had already been installed on the European continent .

With respect to its meaning, the piece of the bishop is the representation of the war or spiritual advisor who helped royalty. In fact, the shape of its upper end refers to the miter, the typical cap of bishops.

According to the experts, the bishop has a relative value that exceeds the value of the pawn by three or three and a half points . When the player has the two bishops, the value of each piece increases. Anyway, there are chess players who relativize the importance of bishops and who are even willing to sacrifice them as part of their strategy.

For those who appreciate the power of this piece, the bishop can become a very powerful weapon when developing attacks and threats at long distance; so that these plays can be carried out, it is necessary first of all to clear the diagonal path that must be traveled.

Many professional or expert players use the bishop for both attack tactics and defense tactics. The fact that he can not step on the squares of the opposite color to that assigned to him at the beginning of each game can be taken as a disadvantage; nevertheless, we can always assign the protection of the cells of his color , with astute movements that leave him alert to the attacks of the opposing team.

Since it is one of the few pieces that can advance as many spaces as free spaces are in its path, some restless people venture to move it as soon as they can and thus expose it unnecessarily to the opponent; Something similar happens with the tower, the queen and the horse, since its " agility " breaks with the slowness of chess itself. Needless to say, impatience often leads to defeat.

In the universe of the comics of X-Men, there exists a personage of name Lucas Bishop Williepondt to which usually they are directed simply by Bishop , that in English means "bishop"; in fact, in some translations it is mentioned with this term in Spanish. His first appearance took place in 1991 and was created by Jim Lee and Whilce Portacio. Bishop is born into a family of aborigines who fled Australia just before it was destroyed by a nuclear attack and took refuge in the United States.