The Knight
Every other piece travels along a line and can be stopped on it. The knight names a destination and appears there, which is why it is the one piece that can move on the very first turn of the game - and the boards below make you do exactly that.
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The knight moves in an L: two squares one way, then one square at a right angle. Say it out loud and it sounds fiddly. Do it four or five times and it stops being a rule and becomes a shape you recognise.
There is a black pawn on b6 for the knight to take, and seven other squares it can go to. Pick it up.
The knight on d5 has eight squares, and one of them takes the pawn. Move it anywhere it is allowed to go.
Notice what the eight squares have in common: none of them touch d5, and none of them are on its rank, its file or its diagonals. That is a second, often easier way to hold the move in your head - a knight goes to the nearest square that no other piece could reach from where it stands.
Its colour flips on every single move
Look at the eight squares again. The knight started on d5, a light square, and every one of the eight is dark.
That is always true, and it is the most useful thing to know about a knight after the L itself. A knight alternates colour with every move, which means:
- if a piece is two knight-moves away, it is on the same colour;
- a knight can never take something standing on a square of its own colour this move - it has to spend a move getting there;
- to work out whether a knight can reach a square in an odd or even number of moves, you only have to look at the colour of the square.
It is the only piece that jumps
Every other piece in chess travels along a path, and anything on that path stops it. The knight is defined by its destination instead: two-and-one away, arriving regardless of what it passed over.
Nothing shows that like the very first move of a game. Here is White's whole kingside, exactly as it starts - king, bishop, knight, rook, and a wall of its own pawns in front of them.
Every white piece here is boxed in behind its own pawns. Tap the squares the knight can still reach.
The rook, the bishop and the king on that board have not got a single legal move between them. The knight has two, and it did not have to ask anyone's permission to get out.
In the corner it is worth half as much
The L points eight ways from the middle of the board and four ways from the edge. From the corner, only two of them land on the board at all - which is the whole content of the old saying "a knight on the rim is dim".
| where the knight stands | squares it reaches |
|---|---|
| the middle four squares (d4, d5, e4, e5) | 8 |
| a middle edge square (a4, h5, d1 …) | 4 |
| a corner (a1, a8, h1, h8) | 2 |
A rook does not care in the slightest where it stands - it always reaches fourteen squares. A knight cares more than any other piece, and that is really what "centralise your knights" means: it is not style advice, it is arithmetic.
The fork
Because a knight attacks squares that are not on any line through it, a piece it attacks can never attack it back. That is what makes the fork - one knight hitting two pieces at once - so much nastier from a knight than from anything else. You answer the check, and the other piece is simply gone.
Try it
The knight on b1 is hemmed in by eight of its own pawns. Get it out.
Common questions
- How does a knight move in chess?
- In an L: two squares in a straight line, then one square at a right angle to it - or equivalently, to the nearest square that is neither on its rank, its file, nor its diagonal. From the middle of the board that gives it eight squares; from a corner, only two.
- Can a knight jump over pieces?
- Yes, and it is the only piece that can. Every other piece slides along squares and is stopped by the first thing in the way. A knight's move is defined by where it lands rather than the path it takes, so whatever stands between is simply irrelevant - your own men included.
- Why can a knight move on the first turn?
- Because it can jump its own pawns. At the start of a game every piece except the pawns and the knights is walled in behind the second rank, so the only first moves available are a pawn push or a knight jump to the third rank. That is why Nf3 is one of the most played opening moves in chess.
- What is a knight fork?
- One knight attacking two pieces at once - most painfully a king and a queen, because the check must be answered and the queen is then simply taken. Knights fork more than any other piece because nothing they attack can attack them back along the same line, so a forked piece cannot defend itself by capturing.
- What is a knight worth?
- About three points, the same rough value as a bishop. The two are not interchangeable, though: a knight is at its best in a closed, crowded position where it can jump and a bishop is stuck, and at its worst on an empty board where a bishop crosses the whole thing in one move.
- Why do people call the knight a horse?
- Because it is carved as one. The proper name is knight in English, and the piece descends from the horseman of chaturanga, the Indian game chess grew out of. Most languages name it after the animal or the rider, which is why a Spanish player calls it a caballo and a German one a Springer, the jumper.
