I’ve been getting into chess lately, both playing strangers and against coworkers on chess.com. It’s been a lot of fun learning my openings, but I’m finding that one of my absolute favorite quick endgames involve knight+queen shenanigans.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about, from a recent game I won quickly:
I checked with my queen protected by my knight, driving the king into the corner. Next move I played was Ne3, threatening white’s queen, forcing it to move. When it went to Qd4, I think attempting to save the queen and threaten my knight, I simply moved my queen to Qg2#, with g2 newly protected by my knight on e3.
The key to the knight-protected queen attack is that you can’t attack the knight, because it isn’t the thing that’s checking the king, and the king can’t attack the queen because it’s protected by the knight. My new favorite one-two punch to the unprepared.
I’m still learning my openings, but I’m up to around 400 ELO now. Still very low, but I’m slowly climbing. One of my favorite things right now is punishing wayward queen attacks as viciously as I can. Protect every piece, look ahead to what each piece (queen and bishop especially) can currently see and where it wants to go, and develop normally. Half the time, the noobs just resign the game when they realize they can’t scholar’s mate my ass.