Course: Strong Knight

A well-placed knight can dominate the board, outclass bishops and rooks, and create threats that are impossible to ignore. This course teaches students how to recognize, create, and exploit powerful outposts - spots where a knight becomes a formidable weapon. The course is divided into four focused chapters: Gaining Material with a Strong Knight, Attacking the King with a Strong Knight, Spotting an Outpost, and Creating an Outpost - each containing 15 topic-related puzzles, followed by 20 mixed puzzles to reinforce pattern recognition. By the end of the course, players will feel confident recognizing outpost opportunities, building them, and unleashing the full power of a well-supported knight.

Goals:

  • Learn how a knight on an outpost generates tactical opportunities - forks, discovered attacks and other motifs leading to clean material gain.
  • Discover how a knight planted near the enemy king becomes a constant source of mating threats, attacking ideas, and decisive initiative.
  • Train your eye to identify ideal squares for your knight, evaluate weak squares in the opponent’s camp, and recognize the structural cues that make an outpost possible.
  • Understand how to engineer outposts through pawn structures, trades, and positional play - turning an ordinary knight into a monster.

Strong Knight: 5 chapters

Authors:

NM Colin Albert