i love pinning knights a little too much, and i need to get it together

today i made yet another questionable knight pin, and i need to give myself an intervention. so im diving into three recent knight pins of different types and motivations, in hopes that i will grow into a discerning purveyor of precisely placed pins.

and if that is too lofty a goal, at least i will shame myself into not compulsively grabbing the first tasty-looking knight pin i see, every single game.

example 1: a pointless pin

heres a fairly archetypal example of my pin addiction. its move 4 and i just cannot resist pinning this knight. even worse, coach monica is also apparently a pin-head and is enabling me:

dont validate my poor choices, monica! ur my coach, not my friend.

its easy to justify to myself why i should indulge in this pin. it develops a rook while attacking and pinning an enemy piece, without hanging anything. theres nothing immediately offensive about it. but game review has a different opinion on this move, and if im honest with myself, deep in my heart i understand why.

the problem with this pin is that theres no point to it. if white does some innocuous developing move and nothing else comes up, i have the vague idea that id like to take the knight so that when white takes back they will have no pawns on both the b and d files—a vulnerable pawn structure that could come to bite them later in the game. so im doing a pin, but also an attack, and somehow im telling myself doing both at once makes it an extra good move even tho its not good at either.

whether or not taking the knight would work out to my advantage, planning this attack makes no sense when whites queen and both bishops have so much room to come out and counterattack, forcing me on the defense.

the pinned knight is prevented from attacking the b5 and d5 squares, but what did i think i was going to put there? they are already under attack. im at least a couple moves away from making them defensible, and white is about to take control.

if id thought of it as an attack, i wouldve realized that the attack was bad. but cuz it had that “ooh yay knight pin” factor, it made it feel like the move got bonus points for potential. like maybe if my attack didnt pan out, it could turn into something useful, depending how the game went. but i didnt have any specific plans for taking advantage of it. the attack was useless, the pin was useless, and together they are not more than the sum of their parts, they are just a waste of time.

just cuz its a tactic dont mean its a strategy.

the kicker is that white makes some mistakes in their attack, and so i do eventually get a chance to take that knight with my bishop and make exactly the trade i wanted, and even that turns out to be bad:

looking at alternate lines, game review still doesnt like this trade even if white developed passively and allowed me to take it earlier, so its not this specific position thats the problem. its beyond my ability to understand what makes this a mistake rather than just another imperfect move, but im still capable of fully blundering pieces most games, so these subtleties are beyond me. for now im still working on understanding that pinning the knight isnt an anytime food.

example 2: forced pin

heres an example of doing it right, in a game i played yesterday. this successful pin started with a check.

my knight was attacked, and i thought why not win some time by developing my bishop and checking? if it blocks with the bishop, im happy to trade cuz bishops are tricky. and if it blocks with the knight, i get my favorite thing in the whole wide world, a knight pin! if i play this right, i might even win that vulnerable looking c pawn!

game review says i should have instead moved my attacked knight back where it started from, but it still likes this well enough, and i think it was a good choice for me. the option of moving the knight back saves the knight, but it reverses development. it feels like losing two turns, and puts me in a position i dont get the point of. 

its always better to make a move i know how to follow thru on, rather than an “optimal” move that will leave me without any idea what im doing.

when white blocked with the knight (which stockfish lite likes twice as much as blocking with the bishop so i do think it was reasonable to expect), i felt joy in my heart. this was a good pin. i had plans for this pin. and forcing the move thru check means i got the pin for free, instead of spending time to get it.

now i have time to go back to my knight!

i go a4, saving the knight while attacking the hanging pawn on c4.

this is the joy of pins: at first glance, white might think their c4 pawn is protected by their knight. but the knight cant legally move there while it is pinned, so this is my chance to grab it while its hot! 

at least, thats how i like to imagine the psychology of my opponent, even tho in this case im playing against a bot that is programmed to understand which moves are legal.

and the strategy works out for me this time, because neither i nor my opponent find the line where queen a4 could win them a pawn after 6 moves of optimal play. instead, game review wanted me to move my horse back where it came from, again. which, no. this is not big brain billion elo chess where we can do 6 perfect moves out of the opening, and i wouldnt know what to do with knight back to b8.

no, instead the bot tries to kick the bishop by going e3, the exact move i was hoping it would make. its the normal pattern for breaking this kind of pin, but in this case i just come away up a pawn. game review gave me exclamation points and stars and that makes me feel validated.

i managed to maintain my lead, despite some questionable moves, and was feeling challenged but hopeful as we moved toward the endgame.

and that is when i decided to do another big brain pin, which went tragically wrong.

example 3: defensive pin

here im up 2 pawns, but our pieces match besides that. the position is getting finicky so i was willing to trade a rook for a rook, but now ive lost my opportunity to capture and my rook is under threat. what would u do in this situation, and what do u think i did?

i considered moving the rook out of danger, but i hadnt managed to make progress when i had both rooks down there. i didnt trust myself not to blunder if i played this out the slow way.

so instead of moving my rook to safety, i pin the horse so it cant take, which has the benefit of also moving my queen closer to where it might be able to finally cause some trouble. if i can start checking, or take those pawns, it wont be long before i win.

was this a good plan?

in general, theres some reasons why not, even if in this case i stand by it.

this kind of pin has just trapped my strongest piece onto one square, for the sake of limiting the movement of whites weakest piece. white is now winning on active material. a threat could force me to choose between moving the queen to deal with it, breaking the pin and losing the rook, or losing something else cuz i dont have enough active material to deal with it. i lose time entering the pin instead of moving my rook to somewhere it can be useful, and i might lose time again trying to get back out of the pin.

and in this case, im about to lose the pawn ive spent so long trying to shepherd to promotion.

but i thought i had figured out exactly the sequence of moves that would happen next, because i thought white would take the pawn and set off some trades. and looking back, my calculations were not wrong. taking the pawn was whites best move, and the trades i had planned would have happened exactly as id imagined. i knew one wrong move would lose me the game, and for my beginner brain simplification is worth a lot, so this would have worked:

the pin wasnt bad in this case, because i knew exactly how i was going to get out of it: with a check that forces a queen trade, after the c file rooks have traded.

the check gives me time to move my threatened rook out of the knights path and onto the enemy queen, and not only that, it gives another check that wins me time to attack whites remaining pawns and eventually move my own so i dont get backrank checkmated.

now im not only in a decent position, im in a position i know how to play:

so, that pin was the right pin for me. it is already move 33, and i dont have the chess stamina to think this hard for a dozen more.

unfortunately, my calculations did not account for what happens if white makes a worse move. instead of taking the pawn, white goes kg2.

at first i thought, well, this doesnt change anything, lets get this show on the road! its not the move i expected, but thats probly cuz its even better for me! white is flailing cuz im winning so hard.

now on to my regularly scheduled queen trade i already planned for.

here i go!

the worst part is, i did note that the king move broke the pin. the pin is no longer there. and my brain said to me “oh, theres no point in keeping my queen here anymore, since its not pinning the knight anymore.” both sides of the pin are done with it, it is just hanging there empty.

i forgot the point of the pin in the first place, which was to protect the rook. i forgot there was still one relevant piece to consider in this pinbreak, which is the actual piece that had been pinned, which should be the most important one to think about in any pin, if im regularly doing pins that make sense.

i so often pin just out of a compulsion for tactics, succeeding only in limiting my own pinning piece from having more choices, that i did not think beyond the idea that if the pin was broken my queen could move without further breaking it. i also did not think on how this queen move was no longer a check that would win me time to break the pin properly. the complexity on the board lasted just one more move than i could calculate for, and i blundered.

the game wasnt unsalvageable, but my spirit was broken so i traded the queens out of spite and threw the game so i wouldnt have to think anymore.

i still like that pin tho.

takeaways

always have a clear reason for a pin. know the reason, remember the reason.

consider how im spending my time to get into it, and consider how im going to get out of it.

bad reasons to pin:

• it might be good for something eventually
• it will make my opponent go “oh no, im pinned, whatever will i do” and they will panic and blunder
• it is very tactical and i like tactics

good reasons to pin:

• protecting a specific square
• blocking a specific square
• zugzwangening
• pinned piece is more powerful or active than the pinning piece
• i have a plan for how the pin starts and ends

every move after i pin:

• remember that the pin exists
• remember why the pin exists
• ask myself if its still doing that thing

the end!

full games

heres the full game against coach monica, with the useless pin, including her dubious analysis. i never remember to read the bot dialogue while playing, but u can save it to read later as long as u remember to grab the pgn from the page as soon as the game ends.

heres the full game against trashbot with the good pin, tragic pin, and alternate lines around the tragic pin: