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Knights, with their L-shaped moves, ability to jump over pieces, and potentially occupy every square, are perhaps the piece that is most difficult to visualise a few moves ahead. At least, for ordinary human minds at the beginner-intermediate level. This makes the knight the best piece to attempt traps for the opponent, as knight forks can be difficult to visualise and anticipate. In the game I played today, my opponent and I were mostly equal in the middle game. I entered towards the endgame with queen and knight, and they with queen and bishop. As we’ll see in the game, the combination of knight and queen was very powerful.

The queen subsumes the possible movements of all other pieces except one, the knight. This means that the queen and knight together, allows for tactics that even two queens cannot achieve. In this game, my opponent’s queen and bishop were relatively boxed in as we each still had 6 pawns each in play. This gave a substantial advantage to my knight, as it could jump over lines of pawns. Once my queen took control of the only open file in the centre of the board, the advantage became overwhelming.

I hope you enjoyed this video, and thanks for watching!

Game on chess.com: https://www.chess.com/game/live/39335995685

[Event "Live Chess"]
[Site "Chess.com"]
[Date "2022.02.22"]
[Round "?"]
[White "Dumitru1952620"]
[Black "vitualis"]
[Result "0-1"]
[ECO "C24"]
[WhiteElo "1394"]
[BlackElo "1328"]
[TimeControl "1800"]
[EndTime "22:57:00 PST"]
[Termination "vitualis won by resignation"]

1. e4 e5 2. Bc4 Nf6 3. d3 d5 4. exd5 Nxd5 5. Nf3 Bg4 6. Nbd2 Bc5 7. Qe2 O-O 8. O-O Re8 9. Qe4 Bxf3 10. Qxf3 c6 11. Ne4 Nd7 12. Bg5 N5f6 13. a3 Be7 14. Rad1 Nxe4 15. Bxe7 Qxe7 16. dxe4 Nf6 17. Rd3 Rad8 18. Rfd1 Rxd3 19. Rxd3 b5 20. Ba2 c5 21. c4 a6 22. cxb5 axb5 23. b3 Rc8 24. Qd1 h6 25. f3 Nh5 26. Rd7 Qg5 27. Qf1 Rd8 28. Rxd8+ Qxd8 29. Qe2 Nf4 30. Qe1 Nd3 31. Qd2 Qd4+ 32. Kf1 Qa1+ 33. Ke2 Nc1+ 34. Kf2 Qxa2 35. Qxa2 Nxa2 36. Ke2 Nc1+ 37. Kd2 Nxb3+ 38. Kc3 Nd4 39. g3 Nxf3 0-1