Malignant Minor Pieces -- A History

*Thank you to @ninjaswat for inventing the creative title! *

Hello everyone! My name is serenesnowflake. I hope you are having a great day and welcome to my first blog post! Thanks for reading this!

Today, I will talk about the power of the minor pieces, and how you can use them. I will go over a handful of strategies for both the knight and bishop and then compare them. For each section, I will also add an example and a model game. Let's get started!

 Knights

"What? I would never get forked... forks are only for my opponents!"

Without a doubt, knights are the trickiest piece on the chess board. After all, they can jump over pieces. The famous World Champion Mikhail Tal remarked in his book "The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal" that the knight moves much like the Russian letter Г.

It can be fun to trick your opponents with knights! Below, I will talk about three useful knight tactics!

The Fork

The fork is probably the most common of the knight tactics. Although it can be done with any piece, usually forks are associated with knights.

A fork, in its most basic terms, is simply a move which places a piece/pawn in a position so that it attacks two or more pieces/pawns at the same time.

Below is an example of a basic knight fork. Try solving the puzzle!

Knight forks can be utilized in many different creative ways, as we will see. Let's take a look at a game with a hidden knight fork that involved two different World Champions, Tigran Petrosian and Boris Spassky!

In the above puzzle, the solution actually involved a hidden knight fork - one that did not exist
in the position already. In many games that you play, the fork won't just show up for you on the board. Rather, you will have to execute a combination first.
 
Sorry for that long paragraph! The solution was 30. Qh8+!. After 30... Kxh8, we have our knight fork - 31. Nxf7+, followed by taking the queen on e5. 
 
That's about it on forks that I have to say. If you want to recognize forks easily in your games, it's important that you have excellent tactical vision (see possible checks, captures, and threats). I find that Puzzle Rush and Puzzle Battle is really helpful for improving that. 

The Smothered Mate

Ahh, the Smothered Mate! This one's one of my favorites - but it's super rare, since your opponent has to be pretty bad to miss it... (no offense to the people who got Smothered Mated).

Basically, the idea of the Smothered Mate is that you trap your opponent's king in the corner and mate them from f7. This usually occurs when your opponent has a pawn cover on g7 and h7 and another piece on g8 (not a queen/bishop) which prevents the king from escaping.

Here's an example of the Smothered Mate:

Although this might seem completely abstract to you, there has been more than one Grandmaster game where one of them blundered Smothered Mate! For this, I will use a game between Alexander Grischuk and Ruslan Ponomariov. Just for some background, Alexander Grischuk and Ruslan Ponomariov have both been super GMs before.

Once again, I will present the game up to a certain point and ask you to solve the puzzle. If possible, cover the solution!

The solution: 26. Qg8+! Nxg8 27. Nf7#

Sorry GM Ruslan Ponomariov....

These players weren't patzers - they were both full fledged GMs, Black being a former FIDE World Champion, but they still missed the Smothered Mate! Whenever you see your opponent's king almost trapped - look out for a Qg8+ and Nf7#, as that is the most common form of the Smothered Mate.

(I believe they have many Smothered Mate puzzles on Puzzle Rush, if you want to practice).

The Greek Gift

The Greek Gift is another pattern that is less common than the fork but more common than the Smothered Mate. Even though it has the word "Greek" in it, I'm not entirely sure where it originated from. Recently, I won a couple of games using it, so I thought that it would probably be useful to cover it here. 

The idea of the Greek Gift is that you sacrifice your bishop on h7 or h2 with check to blow open your opponent's king cover. Then, you play check the king with your knight on g5 and g4, followed by a devastating attack with the queen via h5. 

To make this clearer, I have presented an example below.
 

I hope that illustrated the concept well. Here is a game that I recently played involving the Greek Gift sacrifice (annotated)! Enjoy !

Try applying this in your own games and feel free to send me one if you use it! 

Bishop

"Most chess players know, thanks to the study of master games, that two bishops are stronger than two knights or than bishop and knight, though very few know the reason for this advantage and how to turn it to account." - Richard Reti

The Pin/Skewer

The wrong type of pin:

The right type of pin:

Thank you to chess.com for providing this example. 

The Pin and Skewer are perhaps the most elementary bishop combination. I grouped them together since they are so similar.

A pin is when a bishop attacks another piece. This piece is unable to move since there is a piece of greater material on the same diagonal as the bishop and the "other piece." 

The pin, unlike the fork, is less often a way to simply gain material. It is usually used to put pressure on other pieces. (One common opening pin is when White plays Bg5 to pin the f6 knight to the queen on d8.)

Here is an example:

A skewer is kind of the opposite of the pin - the less valuable piece is in front of the more valuable piece. This is often done with a king as the less valuable piece and is unique to the bishop/queen. 

One famous idea evolved from the pin is called Alekhine's Gun.

In 1930, Alexander Alekhine famously played Aron Nimzowitsch and used this strategy.

In my opinion, that was one of Alekhine's best games ever! I especially appreciate the zugzwang at the end! Notice that Alekhine was able to tie his opponent's pieces up with multiple pins. Many pins coupled together may not win material, but they can force your opponent into passivity!

The Bishop Pair

As Reti said in his quote, two bishops are extremely powerful. This is because the two bishops can control both the light and dark squares, working well in coordination. (The whole is greater than the combination of the parts!)

When they combine, the two bishops have very much attacking potential, or sometimes can just cause a painful nuisance to your the opponent.

A famous game was played between Emanuel Lasker and Johann Hermann Bauer in 1889 where Lasker skillfully defeated his opponent by using his two bishops to blow up Bauer's king position. Here is the game:

Johann Hermann Bauer:

(The chess.com Game Review tells me that both bishop sacrifices were brilliant moves! 2 brilliant moves within 3 moves!)

In this game, the two bishops absolutely destroyed Black's king position so that the queen and rooks could threaten mate. Although they don't provide the heavy firepower, they are extremely useful support pieces by controlling both the light and dark squares.

I also recently played a daily game that showcased the power of the bishop pair. Enjoy!

I really liked this game because my pieces worked very well together in harmony. If I was to choose my best move, it would probably be 16...Bd8. I cannot stress enough the importance of moving your pieces to the right squares - chances do not simply appear on the board for flashy tactics. You first must manuever.

Bishop vs Knight

After I separately analyzed the bishop and knight, you are probably wondering: which is better?

The answer to this question, as you would probably expect, is it depends on the circumstances. Below, I will go over some guidelines on determining which is better in different situations. Please take these guidelines with a grain of salt, as they are not meant to be a rule, simply something that is often applicable. You should always use your own judgment first before referring to the guidelines.

1. Open position vs Closed position

Perhaps the best known bishop vs knight dynamic is the open position vs the closed position. You probably know that bishops are usually better in open positions and knights are often better in closed positions. 

This might be the most applicable guideline in your games, so consider it before you make any bishop for knight (or vice versa) exchanges!

The bishop is often better in open positions. You can take the Lasker game as an example for this - the White bishops had more potential there than the Black knight even if Lasker had not sacrificed. 

However, the knight can be better in closed positions, especially ones with lots of pawns on the same color of the bishop; this is why it is usually a good principle to place your pawns on the opposite color of the bishop. Take the following position for example:

2. Bishop + Queen vs Knight and Queen

I think that the knight and queen is generally more powerful than the bishop and queen. And this is because I feel that the knight and queen has more attacking power - and this is especially evident in these types of endgames:

In the above position, the Black king is very exposed, making it easy to attack with the knight and queen. Furthermore, remember that the knight can be both on light squares and dark squares, giving it more versatility.

For example, a knight on g5 and a queen on h5 can pose many problems to the king by attacking f7 and h7, while the bishop and queen do not have the same potential.

3. Bishop vs Knight with Pawns 
 
The bishop is often more powerful in endgames, since it is a long-range defender and can therefore control many squares on both sides at the same time. The knight, on the other hand, can only control squares on one side, and so it is difficult for it to stop two pawns steamrolling down on opposite sides. 
 
Let's see an example. Which of the below two positions do you think gives White a better chance to draw?
 
Position 1

Position 2

Notice that these two positions are simply different in that the knight and bishop have been switched. However, the first position is clearly easier to defend. The bishop and king might be able to work together to stop those two pawns, but the knight and king are helpless as the knight can only stop one at a time.
 
So if your opponent has multiple passed pawns, you should probably try to keep a bishop on the board!

Conclusion

That's all the tips and guidelines that I have to give concerning bishops and knights! I hope you enjoyed this blog, and I would appreciate any feedback (thumbnail or body) in the comments! Of course, if you have any additional thoughts about this subject, I encourage you to post them below!
 
Until next time, 

serenesnowflake