A tough question...akin to asking when is a bishop better than a knight?
Open files (number of them, who controls them etc) would be very relevant in answering your question.
material wise, two rooks are worth about the same as a queen...it would be by no means rare for two rooks to be superior.
it depends imo, the rooks will be probably stronger when they have some room and they get stronger with less pieces on the board. The rooks aren't so strong when the pawn structure is closed. if the queen has attacking possibilties and the game is very tactical i prefer probably a queen..
It depends on how well you play your rooks/queen. Sometimes it is much easier to play a queen for a mate than to manage two rooks with superior strategy if your opponent has the ability to manage his material wisely in turn. Hopefully you wouldn't get yourself into a trade of that magnitude until the endgame so as to not waste your advantage (usually tempo in a trade of near equal value) on having to reposition your other pieces as well (if you gave your rooks for an opposing queen). Personally I would not give up my queen for two rooks unless it resulted in me getting a very nice position out of the deal as well, such as having a resulting position of my rook(s) on the oppositions 7th rank or in a battery along an open file. Likewise I would only give my rooks for a queen if the rooks were bound by certain circumstances and the opposing queen happened to be active enough to mount a threat against my overall structure. Basically what it means is that you can never tell, you have to analyze each situation differently because what you always want with a trade (especially of such magnitude) is to come out in a better position after the pieces are gone.
Originally posted by flexmorei agree with flexmore ...
My memory from a book i read somewhere is that the queen requires lots of different targets and so can fork them. The rooks require a target to "build pressure on"( and of course the opposing queen not to have what she wants).
i recall seeing an article which highlighted two fischer games where the queen was preferred because it was able to create more problems than the two rooks. so as all economists like to say, with "all things being equal," the queen is preferred because it can roam across the chessboard causing more problems than two rooks.
W😀