[Waterluvian]

I don't think the knight is any more weird than the pawn. It's just weird in different ways. Pawns can move up and capture on an angle. Can en passant, can become another piece.

The King and rook can castle which involves moving multiple pieces and over each other.

So there's a lot of weirdness. But that's not to say this isn't a fascinating or worthwhile investigation.

[lemoing]

Yeah, that's true! The reason I looked into this in the first place because the basics of movement in chess are fairly straightforward until you take a look at some of the weirder edge cases. Knights seem like the simplest out of the "weird" cases :)

[CrazyStat]

I think the easiest way to conceptualize the knight's movement is that the knight moves to the nearest squares that no other piece could move to. In a sense the knight's moves are the complement of the other pieces' moves.

[Waterluvian]

Yeah. Especially since they're consistently weird. Pawns have limited movements. And castling happens once.

[PerryCox]

The pawn movement is acknowledged at the end of the first paragraph:

> Pawns are a little weird, but in general they always have to move forward.

[djsumdog]

Pawns can also change to arbitrary pieces if they reach the end of the board (and I guess a Knight might be the only piece worth changing into other than a queen?)

[alex_stoddard]

"Under-promotion" - deliberately not changing a pawn into a queen is very rare and the unique properties of the knight do matter tactically. Under-promotion not to a knight can matter because of stalemate. (Most under-promotion is the domain of chess problems rather than games). https://www.chess.com/article/view/a-guide-to-underpromotion

[jlg23]

I've found bishops to be more useful in end games because they can block whole diagonals and thus I will gladly exchange my knights for the opponent's bishops. Knights can be easily outmanoeuvred - it is easy to render a knight useless for one move and thereby gain some space to turn a check against you into a more favorable position.

[edgarvaldes]

But if the endgame has blocked pawns, the knights vs bishop is a lot more nuanced.

[jcranmer]

Rooks and bishops can be useful sometimes to turn stalemate into checkmate.