What Is the Most Powerful Chess Piece? Every Piece Ranked by Value

Post by Best Chess Set Ever

Sep 23 2026

A cream queen and a black queen standing in front of a rook, bishop, knight and pawn on a dark background

The queen is the most powerful chess piece. She is worth about nine points, she moves any number of squares along a rank, a file or a diagonal, and from a central square on an empty board she attacks 27 of the other 63 squares. No other piece comes close.

The king is the most important piece, because losing him ends the game. He is not the most powerful: he moves one square at a time. Most arguments about this question are really two people answering two different questions.

Chess piece values, ranked

Piece	Value	How it moves	Squares it can attack
Queen	9	Any distance, straight or diagonal	21 to 27
Rook	5	Any distance, straight only	14, from anywhere
Bishop	3	Any distance, diagonal only, one colour all game	7 to 13
Knight	3	An L shape, and the only piece that jumps	2 to 8
Pawn	1	One square forward, captures diagonally	1 to 2
King	no value	One square in any direction	3 to 8

The square counts are on an empty board and they are the clearest way to see the gap. A rook controls 14 squares wherever you put it. A knight in the corner controls two.

Why the king has no point value

A value only means something if you would consider trading the piece. You can trade a queen for two rooks and judge whether it was worth it. You can never trade a king, so a number for him would have nothing to compare against. Some textbooks write his fighting strength as roughly four points in an endgame, where he becomes an active attacking piece, but that figure is about how useful he is, not what he could be exchanged for.

The strongest chess pieces in order

Queen, rook, then bishop and knight tied at three, then pawn. The bishop and knight tie is genuine rather than a rounding convenience: which one is better depends on the position in front of you, not on the piece.

If you want a finer scale than the beginner's one, there is one worth knowing. Larry Kaufman's 1999 study for Chess Life, built by measuring results across a large database of master games rather than by reasoning about the pieces, put the knight and bishop at 3.25, the rook at 5, the queen at 9.75, and added half a point for holding both bishops. That last number is the interesting one, and it is the reason strong players talk about the bishop pair as a thing in itself.

When the point values are wrong

The numbers are a shorthand. Four situations bend them, and knowing them is most of what separates a beginner from a club player.

Two bishops beat two knights on an open board. A pair of bishops covers both square colours and both work at long range. On a board with few pawns left, that pair is worth noticeably more than the six points on the sheet.

A knight beats a bishop on a closed board. When pawns are locked in chains, the bishop's diagonals run into traffic and the knight jumps straight over it.

A pawn on the seventh rank is not worth one point. One square from promotion it is worth close to a queen, because it is about to be one. This is why endgames with a single passed pawn are so sharp.

A rook on an open file is worth more than a rook that is boxed in. Rooks are the piece whose value swings most with the pawn structure, which is why the advice to put them on open files survives every era of chess theory.

Is the queen worth two rooks?

On the sheet, no: two rooks are ten points against the queen's nine. In practice it depends on whether the rooks can work together. Two connected rooks on open files usually beat a queen. Two rooks that are undeveloped and getting in each other's way usually do not, because the queen can fork them and they cannot defend each other from opposite corners.

Which piece is the most powerful in the opening?

None of them, and that is the useful answer. In the opening the queen is the most powerful piece and the worst one to move, because every minor piece that attacks her gains a tempo while she runs. The pieces that matter in the first ten moves are the knights and bishops, which is why every opening book starts by developing them.

The promotion problem, and why good sets ship with 34 pieces

Since the queen is the strongest piece, a pawn that reaches the eighth rank almost always becomes one. A standard 32 piece set gives each side a single queen, so the usual improvisation is an upturned rook, which is not a queen and is not legal in a rated game.

Both sets we make ship with 34 pieces for that reason: 17 a side, the extra two being queens. It is a small thing until the first time a promotion decides a game.

See both sets, or read how many pieces are in a chess set for the full count.

Common questions

What is the second most powerful chess piece?

The rook, at five points. It controls 14 squares from any square on an empty board, and a pair of connected rooks on the seventh rank is one of the strongest formations in the game.

Is the knight or the bishop stronger?

They are worth the same on paper. The bishop is better on an open board with pawns on both wings, the knight is better in closed positions and when the action is on one side only.

Can a pawn ever be the most powerful piece?

On the seventh rank, effectively yes. A protected passed pawn one square from promotion forces the defender to tie down a major piece to stop it, which is worth far more than its one point.

Why is the queen so much stronger than the other pieces?

Because she combines two pieces. The rook's moves plus the bishop's moves in one piece, which is why her value is close to their five and three added together with a point on top for the flexibility of choosing between them every turn.