Ben Finegold: Master The Knight Moves Like Bob Seger with this Chess Puzzle
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- Опубліковано 6 бер 2021
- Check out Ben's Chessable courses here! www.chessable.com/author/BenF... You don't have to be Bob Seger to work on your knight moves. GM Ben Finegold shows his viewers a simple puzzle / exercise to help master your knight moves and improve your visualization. Some even say this puzzle is a quick measure of your current chess skill.
- Ігри
Higher rated players automatically know what squares pieces are attacking, lower rated players have to keep checking. That's why. Really not hard to understand. It's why low rated players don't see long diagonal attacks. So you say it has nothing to do with chess, but it does. Simply by nature of having more experience in something, you're better at it. Also, rerouting a knight is definitely a chess skill.
Not only that, but higher rated players are also more used to chess calculations. If you take somebody who is good at mental math and somebody who is good at chess and give them something to calculate (such as this), it doesn't matter if the mental math guy has greater "computational brain power", the chess player is more used to brut forcing chess variations and will consequently calculate this faster
That's not quite true. That would be true of there were more pieces. Low level players tend to lose themselves cause there are so many pieces. As someone who only played against my brother and father in my life, I tried doing this and struggled a bit at the beginning but then I got where I couldn't put the knight and stoped having to check the queen. I still gave up midway cause I suck. I would say that experience helps a lot in this cause memorized and recognize (even if it is accidentally) certain patterns on how to put X piece in Y space but I don't think it's cause we have to keep checking
@Ray Aventador I think someone would need to be much higher than 1000 to succeed at this blindfolded but they could work their way up to that for sure!
Ok
Yes. The hardest time I have is to spontaneously see where my opponent's knights can go. I constantly have to keep checking to see if there's a weird fork or something with his knights. Other pieces I see pretty well
Well there's an easy reason: familiarity with the moves! Great chess players have so much more experience visualising knight and queen moves that they can spot the necessary manoeuvers more quickly.
not only visualization, but also speed of calculation: most people will never be able to think as fast in chess as a GM and that's not just pattern recognition, that's simply being built different
@@tee1532 I did it, but instead of a queen, I just put pawns on all the illegal spots and moved the knight without taking any
@@spartacus3111 that's a great idea!
I tried it with knight and queen reversed and still couldn't do it, the truth hurts
Well I just tried it, you just have to think backward and it become really easy
Where can i try this?
@@ronnieinsomnia4028 On lichess you can position editor, you can try it there
i did board editor but i can't move them after.
Nvm i just visualized it solved it under 7 minutes
Thank you so much. This is the most insightful comment. I've always had issues with the knight, but with your comment, it helps me out so much more
I don't know how thinking backwards helps... I mean, you just do the whole process the other way. No real difference.
Wow this is very educational!
Thank you so much for posting this.
Thank you for sharing this!
It's much better training than I expected! ♥
One of the things you intuitively understand if you are "talented" here is that if you want to put your knight in the next square (wherever it may be), all you really need is to map its path backwards from the required square to any square your knight already has been to. You then just go backwards with the knight moves till you reach that square you have already been to and then you just go through the squares you mapped out.
I had the same idea in mind when I did this and it took me 23 minutes
@@smrtfasizmu6161 pay attention to "one of the things". The first time I did this it took me 9 minutes. There's obviously a lot more that comes into play.
A good optimization question would be to find the position of the queen where it takes the knight the most or least amount of moves to complete this puzzle.
I don’t know the answer to your question but there are 16 Queen locations where this challenge is impossible to complete
@@michaelfrank6851 how do you know that
@@santiagomorales9129 no but then you start on h1 instead and move through every square the queen on g7 doesn't cover, was my thinking.. I mean it's not forced that you start on h8 right?
Queen starting on e3, f4, f2, or g3 makes Knight on h1 impossible to reach/get out of
Queen starting on f3, then Knight on g1 or h2
rotate those positions and you have a total of 20 invalid queen positions
otherwise any random queen/knight starting point should have it optimizable with analyzing and removing graph connections
It has everything to do with chess. Getting good at chess isn't about knowing complicated stuff but about internalizing simple things. Ben has said things to that effect himself on several occasions so I'm not sure why he is saying it has nothing to do with chess now. I've met some people who know twenty moves of theory in the traxler and they are still 1100. It's about seeing, rather than having to think about, which squares are attacked and which are safe. It's about seeing what knight manoeuvres are possible. It's about visualizing the board correctly three moves ahead. It's about thinking backwards from your goal not halfway through doing this knight exercise, but when you start because it's natural to you to do so. It 's about a range of small little skills and habits that allow you to improvise quickly and see far ahead in positions you don't know. I'm don't think we need a psychologist to figure that out (though their input would probably be helpful).
I think a downside of many top chess players being masters by the time they are 12 and grandmasters at 16 is that at that age you don't quite understand your own learning process and later you never quite get to understand how you learned. As a result many chess players and even some coaches don't really understand what the difference between them and weaker players is and don't entirely remember what kind of time and practice it took them to get there. Then they recommend Dvoretsky's endgame manual or My System to 900's. It's why Maurice Ashley, who became good when he was a little older, has a much more solid grasp on those things making apps to train visualization and such. If, taking examples from the recent pogchamps, you watch Maurice Ashley coach Myth and compare it to Hikaru Nakamura coaching Pokimane, it's clear one of those guys knows what might be relevant to weaker players looking to improve and one of them does not. My favorite moment was Hikaru showing some complicated sacrifice leading to mate 20 moves deep into the London and Pokimane at the end being uncertain whether the position is actually checkmate or not. Telling her to check for kingmoves, captures of the piece checking and blocking moves would probably have been more useful than opening theory.
After an hour of trying to figure out where I can set this puzzle up my first try was 12 mins, second try 10 mins, third 8.
A tip if you wanna do it solo and make sure you don't 'cheat' set up rooks in the queens vision
That's kind of cheating because you should visualize the queen moves yourself
Then you slightly change the position of the queen
@@mynamesbigmynamesbigmyname4757 when you’re as blind as a bat like moi you gotta do what you gotta do. Plus I’m sure it’s good for beginners to help
Dude half the challenge is visualizing the queens squares. I'd imagine covering those with rooks would almost halve the time it takes
@@ericbhatnagar2873 at least when you use rooks you never mess up. I almost guarantee that if someone is having trouble with this exercise (aka getting stumped often) then its almost certain that at one point they will accidentally move a knight onto a square controlled by the queen and not realize it.
Knowing how the knight and queen moves is *required*, but it is not *sufficient*. Obviously, the path that one needs to spot here is not 1-move deep. So, you need to be good at calculating and recognizing patterns. Naturally, high ELO players are better at those.
There is no pattern here, you just need to find a route for the knight, while not blundering the knight in the proccees (something which most lower rated players will do, higher rated players don't make 1 move blunders which is a big advantage when it comes to this problem as well). People who don't play chess or don't play much chess severily underestimate the importance of blunders and how they are what decides 90% of power rated games.
Okay, but i suck at chess and did the puzzle in about 15 minutes because i figured out how to find paths easily by going back, and considering the possible points to jump to the next "destination". I guess that's probably useful in chess also, but a big difference is that black never moves, it's always the same squares to avoid. I guess it may be useful for practising knight move patterns, but I am the living example that that doesn't make you play better chess games overall.
@@smrtfasizmu6161
The patterns that are being referred to are probably routing patterns, which I’ve noticed myself seeing more easily as I play more chess. For example, there’s a pattern of moves you can play to move the knight to an adjacent square. Knowing that pattern ahead of time and not having to figure it out in the puzzle was very helpful.
Did this twice succesfully. For me it was helpful to figure out the hardest maneuvers by going backwards from the next landing square.
Thanks Ben this is great
Is there a place like a website where I can try this ?
Edit : nevermind the video answered
Please tell me also
@@divyanshutomer3948 it's in the video
@@uwu3504 Where's "here"?
Time stamp pls?
@Oissev Onos I meant when he says "right here," where is here? I'm on youtube, so it's not here. Is he on some chess site?
I sat down with an actual board and set the condition that if I "Cheat" that I need to completely redo the puzzle from the start. Still here on the 4th rank...
I resign !
No wait never resign !
@@TheRst2001 terrible !
I resigned in under four minutes!
For those who can't do it where the video says, you can also do it while editing a lichess analysis board :)
But what about the kings
@@lukegrave11 ignore them lol
It may not have much to do with chess as a whole, but it still requires foresight. Even in a game of chess I will see where my knight would like to be and I have to plan out the maneuvers to get there.
Everyone here "I did it in..." ignoring his prediction that you probably cheated without knowing.
To be fair, what's the likelihood that a person watching this video have someone nearby to get to check them? I'm here past midnight trying it out, so I don't have anyone readily available to check me. :/
Well I didn't time myself, but I know I didn't "cheat". At the start, before you are visualising each of your multiple jumps, cheating without knowing is hard - you are constantly questioning whether each step is the right one and looking back at the queen as you go. And then once you learn to chart the "megajump" to the next target square, you are visualising the queen's domain as you chart the route in your mind, so you automatically exclude the queen's squares. At least I did.
Hey, this was posted on my birthday.
Go Ben!
Finally completed it took about 21 minutes. first time. After a few rows I started to see a familiar pattern and im sure next time will be much faster. 1100 Rating Rapid 1000 Blitz
Just came back after a day and I actually have an easier time calculating how to get the knight to a certain square in game now
This is amazing, i have nearly the same ratings and it took me exactly as long.
Took me 14 minutes to do the whole board, guess my rating I'll give you the answer in a day
Edit : my rating on lichess is 1620 both in blitz & rapid. For those who wonder I recorded my gameplay and watched it to make sure I didn't cheat. I did it again today and it took me 7 minutes and 20 seconds.
1350
1649
1750
1300
1800
So I completed the challenge in 13 min and 30 sec the first time and then 9 min the second time. Very nice exercise! I was fooling around a bit and decided to make it harder by adding a black bishop on a1. Try the challenge now with the knight on h8 (just for a starting square even though it sees the bishop) and try to go to all the squares from right to left that don't see the queen and the bishop. It can be done and I found that going from the f8 square to the e8 square is absolutely beautiful. The knight traverses almost entire board and does its' best dancing around the queen. Also f8 to c8 is pretty cool too. Let me know if you guys can do this too and if you think it is harder or easier since there are less squares that the knight can land on but also less available spaces. Thanks!
I'm actually glad I did that move he mentioned in a really good time, I didn't timed it, but maybe it was under a minute...
I'm very used to olympiad math exercises, so maybe why, with a little bit of back reasoning and with some properties I managed to do it.
Guess one way is Ng6,Nf4,Nh3,Nf2,Ng4,Nf6,Ne8,Nc7.
If you still want the challenge but want a slightly easier version without changin much, start with the knight on a1 instead of h8 and work left to right and then come back (the come-back being the excersice Ben proposes). Those backward knight moves are really counter-intuitive. Moving forwards comes easier (and you have more space at the beginning to maneuver because the queen is still in d5)
That's so interesting 😲🤯
A possible way explanation can be that higher rated players have played more(of course) thus in more games they’ve had to reroute their knights to better squares with some other pieces in the way, so they have more experience on this
Haven't even watched the video yet, but just wanted to say I love the title. Ain't it funny how the knight moves?
Go Ben!!
I think I can win the starting position of the video if it's black to move. I'd offer a draw first, but if you forced me to play, 70% that I don't lose.
@Vesyal No but I can tie my shoelaces most mornings
This made me realize I was blinding myself to the g6 square because I associated the queen diagonal as light square and there's the horizontal line as well
Oh this should be a challenge all the streamers do
workin on our knight moves
5:57 best "the truth hurts!" ever.
Its like the "Postman problem" many CPU and AIs are measured against lol.
Studying graph theory right now for my algorithms class and was just thinking about it from this angle lmao. I think it's even simpler than that because even though you have to visit every square, you also have to do so in a fixed order. In a graph where vertices are tiles and edges are where knight can go, you want shortest path to next tile in the sequence (going right to left top to bottom excluding queen covered tiles). If you just calculate shortest paths for each subproblem (i.e. going from one tile to the next) it would give you a solution to the puzzle.
Ben!!
Any other fun chess minigames like this?
not too hard, there are a few spots where the queen covers almost all the squares that the knight must move to before moving to the square in question, but you just have to route to that square. For example, to get the knight to h6, the only square that gets you there that isn't covered by the queen is g4
Kobe!
Its actually really counter intuitive how the knight moves
After months of drilling, I can finally do this drill in less than 3 minutes. Thanks, Ben!
I don't know if this is typical, but funnily enough I took to the knight pretty early on as a kid because it seemed like the perfect counter to the queen. Namely because I initially thought was overpowered and shouldn't be in the game. XD Of course I know better now, but what I mean is that I started to get the hang of knight visualization "because" of my dislike for the queen since I kept looking for paths to attack it. So this exercise is a phenomenal way to visualize it's movement because of the restricted squares you can move to, which makes you think backwards and forwards.
There will be outliers though
This is a common programming exercise (recursion, heuristics, or mirroring chaining, take your pick)
So people like me (who only watch chess, but don't play) but have the algorithm basically memorized, will only really be caught up by walking the algorithm and moving the night.
You know what me and Carlson have in common ?
We both know how a knight moves.
Can someone explain how to set this up? I've never used the board editor before.
Cant I just take the queen and call it a day
i did it in 10 mins and i am 2000 blitz on lichess i was a little bit sleepy but the things is sometimes i caught myself putting the knight on the queen's squares, so ben is right actually im pretty sure people did mistakes but didn't even notice.
Everyone thinks it’s to do with experience moving the pieces. I don’t think so. I think it’s about spatial reasoning. People with exceptional special reasoning will find the Knight maneuvers easy to do, and will have an easier time keeping track of what squares they have been to. People with exceptional spatial reasoning are also very likely to have an aptitude for chess.
I ended up rerouting my knight in the starting corner A LOT, but the last row was oddly the easiest (probably because you learn to route your night in the bottom right as opposed to top right) I did it in probably about 10 minutes, but I did catch myself cheat twice.
Pretty sure I did not cheat more than once after crossing the queen line, considering how you use the same squares.
9 minutes at 1550ish. first few ranks were slow, but sped up as I went.
what is that position at the start
now imagine trying to do this at 700 🥲
The truth hurts
700 here. I try, to succeed I need to give "lifes" and even with that failed miserably when I was in the 6 rank...
@@juansebastian934 the lesson is...
@@AnandSivaram22 watch less youtube study and train more lol
@@juansebastian934 incorrect. The lesson is, never try.
I did it in 8 minutes
*with someone watching my moves don't you worry
"A Squeen" definition: a square that the queen attacks.
That B2 square was probably the hardest to get to... ;)
When I first saw this all I thought was move the queen to e6 or f5 and the knight is trapped
Where can I find the solution to this puzzle where the knight makes it to knight on a1, Na1 all the way from Nh8?
took me 15 minutes, figured out how to do it efficiently near the end
first half was like 12 minutes, second half was 3
Where is he practicing? What app or website?
I find it so much easier to work backwards
It's planning and memory
took me about 10min in first try
I can imagine that this can really test your chess abilities to see what your rating is because it somehow tests your overall control over the board and also the ability to think forward. But I don't think it would work the other way that if you practiced this you would become any better at chess.
I bet this exercise would help someone's bullet rating if anything
I did this in 15 mins over a real chess board. I marked all of the queen controlled squares with coins, things are annoying close to the queen but the second half of the board below the queen is way easier with a lot of usable squares.
I'm not interested in having a ranking but I watch chess and play puzzles all the time. I could probably beat an 800 - I'd just play some boring opening and let them blunder in the middle game.
5min12, around 2200 in blitz on lichess, retrograde analysis is your friend.
I am also 2200 and this gives me a headache
Yeah that was approximately mine too. Once you see the key ideas, it becomes faster and more intuitive. The third time I finished it was 3.8 minutes.
I'm really struggling with this, when in game I wanna put my knight on a specific square, I sit there for a minute just trying to figure out the sequence
Higher rated players knows by memory most of the moves, when they have to think how to move the knight to certain place, they did it so many times that it comes naturally how to do it. A newer player, have to think a lot more because they don't have the muscle memory of it.
I can fly through this test - not sure how it explains why I don’t pay attention to what my opponent is doing
it's SOOO much easier to do if you cover the illegal squares with pawns or something
@@santiagomorales9129 that is literally what i am saying
12 min - 1000 rating. After the first 3 rows, you start getting the gist of it, you learn where in the table you can manouver your knight to change into the other "dimension", there are like 2 dimensions available for the knight to move on, that's how I see it.
this video illustrates that very highly rated players don't understand the psyche of lower ones
Do you all think this is good merely as a “talent checker” or is it actually a good board vision exercise for people to get better?
it toook me 14,5 minutes, but first I put pieces on all squares controlled by the queen because I didnt want to spend an hour doing this (and still not to be sure wether I have accidenatly cheated or not). I'm rated 1800 in rapid on lichess.
I did it in 9 minutes first try and I’m kind of annoyed how easy it looked in the video
Ben, you would agree that you know addition. However you cant add huge 15digit numbers quicker than the "human calculator". Weird?
4:32 first att 1200 elo
2:33 second att
where do i try this i looked everywhere
Chesscom or Lichess board editor.
I m a beginner(1300 rapid lichess) but I am interested to know if advanced players already know where the knight gets attacked? Like I have to think for a sec before moving it
2200 chesscom blitz here, dunno if I qualify as advanced.
I have to look for a second too in the case of some squares. For instance, I almost fell into the trap Ben said, I calculated a route via a8 only to realise that it's controlled by the queen. The difference between us would be (just an opinion) that my 'second' could be shorter than yours. 😀
8 minutes 30 seconds is what I got
1400 rapid
You only need the legal moves of the queen and the legal moves of the knight? Well you only need that and legal moves of the all other pieces to play chess as good as a GM. Theoretically.
What is more. He is most likely right about saying that everyone with rating below 2k is worse than Magnus, but someone with rating below 2k could be better if only he "trained" for this which means just use a knight A LOT.
Took me 11 minutes, rated around 1500.
Fide or online?
After you find the trick, the few attempts after Will be really easy
Anyone just have the notation to share?
13:49 on my first try. Gosh that was super difficult! Glad I had a real board, made moving quickly much easier. I did place it in the path of the queen like 6 times, but kept my hand on the knight most of the time, and always took back illegal squares. What an awesome chess minigame.
tried it twice and got ~7 minutes each time
My rating is 1800 and I’ll do it tomorrow
I’m actually able to do this pretty quickly. Interesting. Once I think “go backwards before forwards” and know the few dead-end spots, and realize the queen isn’t in an exact “center”, it’s easy.
EDIT: 6 minutes. Could do better, too. I’m bad at chess and good at this.
Wait a min what's your rating then
@@speeddemon2901 I’ll know soon lol
Very late here but I just did this and got 6 minutes on my first try too! :)
Took me 5 minutes. I'm rated
If it’s an enemy that’s okay lmao
i tried it and it took me 15 minutes and 11 seconds
5 seconds later: someone loses the game cuz of this move
The someone: ARGH HE SCAMMED ME
That's also explain why beginners let their knight on a bad square. They can't navigate or figure how to reach some points. Experimented player use patterns (clusters of moves) to move the Knight, and don't even "calculate". Well that's my guess.
@@santiagomorales9129 thank you, I didn't know that term could be used in english. We also say "cases conjuguées" in french.
First you say it's not requiring chess skills, so it's good as the talent test and then you say that the higher rated player is always better. It doesn't make much sense.
took me 30 seconds from e7 to c7. has to do more with math and logic. im 1400 rank
Stfu
First time took me 4 and half minutes
It's because pattern recognition is a good indicator of chess skill and this puzzle also requires pattern recognition.
Took me 10 seconds to do the whole board, guess my rating I'll give the you answer in a day
69 stars out of 420
3
Found Stockfish in the comments.
this is like a chess IQ test lol
Address you're oppenents threat well and move on. Find the steady state and evolve it proportionally.