I have done both higher and lower poly pieces:
I had some parts smooth badly until I decided to look which way my normals were facing. My base pieces were all inward facing, and the tops were all outward facing. Turned them around and they went back to normal 
Low poly look fine.
High poly seems not to have smoothed out profile on the bishop particularly. It’d top also seems to have a blip in the shape.
It’s a good habit to check the normals.
Yes, the issue was this: I did not resize it properly. I forgot to do a general rescaling after smoothing out the object and instead took parts and tried to do them individually. Thus resulting in a “blip”, as you say.
