Use a Knight to Make a Fork when Playing Chess

Video Transcript

"Hi! My name is Ken and I am here today to talk to you about Chess. Once again, all these pieces have their different functions. One of my favorite pieces of course is the Knight and why do I like the Knight? Because it moves in a random fashion. It moves the L shaped 1, 2, 3 and it takes a lot of concentration on the other opponents part to avoid getting what we call being forked. Let's just take a look at what that means. Let's say we have our King, the Queen and the Rook into a certain position here. This is a fork 1, 2 and over. Now in the next move if I go 1, 2 and over, I can take the Queen, 1,2 and over I can take the Rook. The opponent has to make a choice about which pieces are going to lose and the Queen is the most important piece and the Rook is secondary next to the most important piece. Of course the King is the most important piece on the board. So the Rook also known as splitting the 2 pieces, the person has to make a bad choice. In this case, the person is going to save the Queen. I would then take the Rook, then the Queen would take my Knight. Now is that a good trade? I have the Rook which is 5 points and I have the Knight which is 3 points. So on terms of points, you can see that this was a bad trade on the terms of black. It was a good trade for white. So white is now winning the game because it has the good trade. So what's the problem? The problem is when you have your Queen moving around and say you have the Rook out here, the thing is always moving in this L shaped thing and putting these two pieces in jeopardy, so you always have to constantly think what is the next move. You always have to think ahead. What's the next move of the Knight? What's the next L? Can that get me in trap? Am I going to get trapped in a fork or Rook situation which means I am going to lose an extra piece. I am going to have to make a bad choice. So that is one of the reasons that I like the Knight because (a) it moves in sort of a random fashion, (b) requires the opponent to concentrate on every move of the Knight to avoid getting forked and we can see him in other areas when he is trying to think about the Knight. He is worried about that and I might be able to get an advantage on him because he is concentrating on one of my other pieces."