Yeah, that's pretty standard with the knight and forks.
Same sort of thing on defense. Can these pieces be forked? First just check if they're on different colors.
Or lets say a knight checks your king, if you move diagonally then the knight can't check him again (because the next attacked square has to be a different color).
Also when trying to find how many moves it will take to get to a square. Because it changes color each move, the answer is always 1, 3, 5, or 2, 4, 6 e.g. if you can't get there in 2 moves then the answer is at least 4 already.
Great!
Thanks for the comments, and leiph18 I'm glad you said it's pretty standard with the knight and forks. This concept is new to me and it's nice to hear this is a well known idea, so there's no doubt in my mind that I should practice this.
I've always heard people say "oh the light squares are weak" or "Black has a strong grip on dark squares" etc. I never really understood these concepts, but I think learning to look for light/dark squares for Knight forks might be the start of it. Thanks again.
Hi everyone,
I wanted to ask the community here if anyone looks for tactics by scanning for light squares and dark squares.
I recently came across a website chesstactics.org (by Ward Farnsworth) that suggests looking at light squares and dark squares when trying to identify Knight forks.
Farnsworth says you may be able to spot Knight forks by just looking at possible knight moves but one way that can help is recognize that the Knight always moves to a different colour square. So if your Knight is on a light square, when it moves it must go on a dark square, and from that dark square, it could fork two pieces on light squares. Therefore at the start of the sequence, since your Knight is on a light square, look for enemy pieces that are also on light squares and that will help you find potential pieces that can be forked.
He gives this example (White to move):
In this position Farnsworth says "notice first here that your Knight is on a dark square; now look for Black pieces also on dark squares. You find the Black rook and king, and ask whether they can be forked. They can, with Nd5+." He then goes on and says the next part of the analysis is to see whether the d5 square is protected -- it is, but the pawn is pinned. But the starting point was to look for Black pieces on dark squares.
Here is another example (White to move):
Farnsworth says "White's most advanced knight (generally the one you want to examine first) is on a light square. Again you might just look for knight moves, or you might look for forking candidates by scanning for Black pieces also on light squares, and find many -- both of his knights, one of his bishops, one of his rooks, and his king. Nd6+ forks Black's king and b7 bishop..." He goes on with more analysis.
So Farnsworth says one way to see knight forks is to do the colour scan he suggested, but sometimes it will be more efficient just to look directly at your knight moves without reference to colour, and he says to experiment with both.
This colour scan idea is new to me, does anyone here do this, and is it a well known, accepted idea? Thanks in advance!