Opening Knight Forks - Quickly Take Valuable Pieces

One of the most common opening moves in chess at the advanced level is to use your knight to fork between the queen and rook, or between the king and rook. A fork is a move that puts 2 pieces at risk of being captured. One piece will be moved, and the other captured. This fork requires you to develop your knight and bishops early on, and therefore is easy to spot and avoid.

Here is the fork between the queen and rook:

Notice how I moved my knight to g5 once black’s knight was at f6. If the knight wasn’t there, the queen could have taken my knight:

A good way to defend is to move your d-pawn, so if the queen takes the knight, the bishop takes the queen:

If this plays out, you can move your other knight to capture c7, since the queen no longer guards that square, and that gives you a fork itself.

So watch out for that if you’re playing black and find yourself in this situation.

Now that we’ve gone over how to do this fork, let’s go over how to defend.

You might be inclined to move your knight to h6 to capture when the white knight takes f6. However, this leaves the knight open to the classic trade where I exchange my bishop for your knight.

Now I can intimidate the remaining black knight, and therefore continue with the fork, plus you lose a knight, an extremely valuable piece.

A good way to defend is to guard the e5 and g5 squares by moving your knight and pawn. Often, this game plays out as a defense:

Now white cannot advance, and therefore cannot fork. They therefore have to get the knight or the pawn out of the way. This leaves plenty of time to castle, avoiding the fork.

Castling is another common way to avoid the fork. This is the game that plays out in this case:

Now the knight cannot finish the fork.

An important thing to note for both sides to check if the bishop is in the right position. If you’re white, and you attack without the bishop, the king can just take the knight (though you do ban them from castling).

As you can see, white moved their d-pawn without developing the bishop, leaving nothing guarding the f6 square.

If you want to fork between the king and the rook, just do the same thing on the other side of the board (e4 becomes d4, nf3 becomes nc3, etc).

The Wayward Queen Attack can lead to a quicker, easier, fork between the king and the rook. My next post will be about this opening move, so stay updated.

Thank you all for reading

— ChessPawn921