Understanding Minor Piece Imbalances: The Knight
This article is the second edition of a series covering minor piece imbalances. In the first part, I wrote about the bishop's characteristics in such situations. Click here to check it out! In today's article, the discussion will be on a knight's preferences when pit against a bishop. Some of you may notice that I have written an article about knights. Entitled How to be Your Opponent's Worst Knightmare, the focus was on knight endings - especially extremely simplified ones.
As you will soon realise, the knight is, in some way, a bishop's opposite. A favourable position for a bishop turns out to be unpleasant for the knight. Conversely, in a position where the knight is triumphant, the bishop will perform poorly.
1. Knights thrive in closed positions
In closed positions, many pawns remain on the board and the enemy bishop, as we have learnt in part one, suffers from a limited scope. On the other hand, our knight is unfazed by the lack of open lines because he can jump over the pawns gracefully and manoeuvre around them. The next ending I will show you is an extreme example of a minor piece imbalance where black's knight enjoys the closed nature of the pawn structure. Taken from International Master Sagar Shah (Co-founder and CEO of Chessbase India), this game perfectly illustrates how this advantage can be realised.
2. Knights work better when there are pawns on one side of the board only
If there are pawns on only one side of the board, the bishop's long range is no longer pertinent. This accentuates the enemy knight's ability to hop onto squares of both colours. To highlight my point, here is an extreme yet instructive example from International Master Jeremy Silman.
3. Knights should always look for good outposts
A defended knight on a good, central home is extremely powerful. Since he is the least mobile piece, he would work better this way, especially if he cannot be dislodged. A good outpost generally exists more often in such a minor piece imbalance because the knight simply needs a hole that is of the opposite colour to the enemy bishop. A hole refers to a square that can no longer be controlled by an enemy pawn because the pawns on the adjacent files have moved too far forward or no longer exist. If you want to have a better understanding of this concept, I recommend checking out a video by National Master Jerry (ChessNetwork) from his Beginner to Chess Master series.
Many of you probably do not have any problem moving your knight to a desired square. Instead, the challenge is in creating good squares for your knight. In order to improve this positional skill, I often advise my students to be sensitive not only to pawn moves that create holes, but also to minor piece trades. To illustrate this, I present you a game between Vasily Smyslov and Iosif Rudakovsky played in 1945.
I hope that you now have a better understanding of the tricky minor piece. I will continue this series with an article on the two bishops - how to use them and how far you should go to preserve them. If you don't want to miss out on that, feel free to follow my account.
