It's been a while since my last stunning insight, but I assume members of this club can only take in information very slowly, so I wouldn't want to overload you. For today, we need to consider the following position, where I hope people can deduce that white has just captured a black bishop on g6, and black is considering how to recapture.
First we will consider this position using the two standard rules people are often erroneously taught to help them make these decisions. The first would be that “having fewer pawn islands is better than having more”, leading us to assume hxg6 is the correct move. The easiest way to dismiss this rule as nonsense is to consider any situation where you still have all three of your major pieces on the board. Then, your ideal plan wold be to have an open file for each of your pieces to work on, thus meaning you need three separated open files, thus meaning your optimum number of pawn islands is four (since obviously the a and h files are much less useful than others) which is, you will note, not the smallest number possible.
The second bad piece of advice is to “capture back towards the centre”, which would again imply hxg6. This is simply absurd, since we all know that in the majority of endgames, having an outside passed pawn is advantageous, so why would we select the very captures that make this less likely to occur.
Then we move on to an actually useful thought, namely:
"When you have a choice between two pawns with which to make a capture, decide based on which file you would prefer to be open."
Using this maxim brings us to a different and much more accurate conclusion. Capturing back with the h pawn doesn’t really do any harm or any good, since it is unlikely either player will be making use of the h file soon. On the other hand, capturing back with the f pawn allows black to soon play Rf8 and target the backward and weakened white f2 pawn. It also, helpfully, increases our number of pawn islands (thus giving more activity to our major pieces) and captures away from the centre (thus giving us a better pawn structure for most endgames). All in all, very easy to see why the computer rates this as the best move, and not at all difficult to work out, provided you ignore all the mistaken advice you will have previously been given.
First we will consider this position using the two standard rules people are often erroneously taught to help them make these decisions. The first would be that “having fewer pawn islands is better than having more”, leading us to assume hxg6 is the correct move. The easiest way to dismiss this rule as nonsense is to consider any situation where you still have all three of your major pieces on the board. Then, your ideal plan wold be to have an open file for each of your pieces to work on, thus meaning you need three separated open files, thus meaning your optimum number of pawn islands is four (since obviously the a and h files are much less useful than others) which is, you will note, not the smallest number possible.
The second bad piece of advice is to “capture back towards the centre”, which would again imply hxg6. This is simply absurd, since we all know that in the majority of endgames, having an outside passed pawn is advantageous, so why would we select the very captures that make this less likely to occur.
Then we move on to an actually useful thought, namely:
"When you have a choice between two pawns with which to make a capture, decide based on which file you would prefer to be open."
Using this maxim brings us to a different and much more accurate conclusion. Capturing back with the h pawn doesn’t really do any harm or any good, since it is unlikely either player will be making use of the h file soon. On the other hand, capturing back with the f pawn allows black to soon play Rf8 and target the backward and weakened white f2 pawn. It also, helpfully, increases our number of pawn islands (thus giving more activity to our major pieces) and captures away from the centre (thus giving us a better pawn structure for most endgames). All in all, very easy to see why the computer rates this as the best move, and not at all difficult to work out, provided you ignore all the mistaken advice you will have previously been given.
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