Kick the knight!
We're good students and we do as our teacher taught us: we try to control the centre, develop our pieces, castle the king and we kick knights!
What? Nobody ever mentioned a fourth opening principle. And yet, it's such a key concept in many openings, to drive the opponent's knights from their ideal squares in the opening from where they can control the centre: c3/c6 and f3/f6.
Of course there is this one Aljechin/Alekhine defense that makes us think it's ok to have our poneys abused, but no, it's not. Nobody likes to be kicked. What the Aljechin defense rather shows us, is that we always have to weigh the benefits of chasing horses against the drawbacks of advancing our pawns too far in the opening.
How often did I get screamed at by the computer evaluation when I delayed kicking a knight in the opening, but yet I failed to understand the importance. Only when I saw the idea formulated clearly by IM David Pruess, I started to appreciate the concept.
Check out his video here
Let us now look at this position from my game from the first round of the 2024 chess.com daily chess tournament.
My opponent allowed me to kick his pony on move 5. His knight has to retreat or advance and get kicked around. Interestingly in the mirrored position below, kicking the knight doesn't work because of tactical reasons, as mentioned in the video of David Pruess.
But let's get back to my game. The knight got booted to a6 on move 9 (see position below), where it lamented it's sad existence until the end of the game.
My opponent's other knight got the same treatment, being kicked on move 12 and 14. My opponent further neglected development and in the position below I managed to find a nice tactic to win a piece in an ever dominating position. Can you spot it?
After this, I wanted to finish the game in style and decided a piece offer, although strictly unnecessary, was necessitated. There were quite some variations to calculate (and I probably missed some), but his king was in a box and couldn't escape:
The key take away though of this game, is that my opponent played a piece down, the sad knight on a6, from move 9. What a kick!
After writing this blog post I checked the game review of my game. Our cybernetic overlord found one imprecision on move 8 when I overestimated the threat of Bxf2 and didn't bother to calculate. I almost hear the silicon irony in his commentary: You missed the opportunity to kick a knight!
Check out the full game below: