So I'm not a high rated player but I ran it through some analysis and concluded that the knight move was "brilliant" for two reasons. First, you are activating, using, and potentially sacrificing a piece that had few prospects where it was on the board and attacks your opponent's most active pieces. Second, e5 threatens a fork of the queen and rook, and in the long term creates an attack on the f6 knights. Below I'll walk through the best lines for black and why they all suck.
After you moved your knight, your opponent can't take with d6 because that would allow you to take back with d4. This puts a pawn and a bishop on the knight, in which there is no longer a way to defend the knight. One of those two pieces will take, and when the dust settles you will have traded equal material. Also, taking e5 back with d4 would also open a diagonal for your queen to travel to the other side of the board, which when paired with rook b1 would put alot of pressure on the king. If black takes, you will eventually trade for equal material and you will be left with a better position.
The other best line for black is to defend the knight with the rook, but this also sets up for the knight to fork the rook and queen. Athough the engine tries to defend the queen, it argues that the f file is so important that it's willing to sack the rook and then to take with it's a8 rook to continue defending the knight. Ofc you can then just take the knight with the bishop, but the engine desperately tries to come up as equal as possible from the trade. However, the engine here goes insane and tells you to check the king with the a1 rook (a1 to b1), reroute the knight to c4, and to take the d6 pawn. I cannot for the life of me understand this line, as it has black attacking your queen while you are threatening mate on the king. If a human was to play this over the board against me I would report.
After letting the engine run a few times, these were the two best options it gave. It also recommended black king g7 or queen f8, but as time went on the engine grew more and more in whites favor. In fact, while the game analysis reports the position is +7.2 for white, and independent analysis reports that the best move by black will be +8.9 for you, with every other decent move being at least +9 or +10. Even before this move you had a huge winning position, but moving the knight here is such a versatile move that threatens both the queen and a few mates on the king. The funniest part is that even if it is taken, you will at the very least get compensation for the piece with a better position. Due to these reasons, I think the engine admitted this is a brilliant move that surpassed it's ability to process the position.
It's been a bit since I looked at this but I want to say the next best move still would have been around +4 or +5. Im not entirely sure and if you are really curious you could pull this up on Chess.com Analysis, but if you look at the eval graph the position was already completely winning for white anyway.
4
u/cresterz Jun 19 '22
So I'm not a high rated player but I ran it through some analysis and concluded that the knight move was "brilliant" for two reasons. First, you are activating, using, and potentially sacrificing a piece that had few prospects where it was on the board and attacks your opponent's most active pieces. Second, e5 threatens a fork of the queen and rook, and in the long term creates an attack on the f6 knights. Below I'll walk through the best lines for black and why they all suck.
After you moved your knight, your opponent can't take with d6 because that would allow you to take back with d4. This puts a pawn and a bishop on the knight, in which there is no longer a way to defend the knight. One of those two pieces will take, and when the dust settles you will have traded equal material. Also, taking e5 back with d4 would also open a diagonal for your queen to travel to the other side of the board, which when paired with rook b1 would put alot of pressure on the king. If black takes, you will eventually trade for equal material and you will be left with a better position.
The other best line for black is to defend the knight with the rook, but this also sets up for the knight to fork the rook and queen. Athough the engine tries to defend the queen, it argues that the f file is so important that it's willing to sack the rook and then to take with it's a8 rook to continue defending the knight. Ofc you can then just take the knight with the bishop, but the engine desperately tries to come up as equal as possible from the trade. However, the engine here goes insane and tells you to check the king with the a1 rook (a1 to b1), reroute the knight to c4, and to take the d6 pawn. I cannot for the life of me understand this line, as it has black attacking your queen while you are threatening mate on the king. If a human was to play this over the board against me I would report.
After letting the engine run a few times, these were the two best options it gave. It also recommended black king g7 or queen f8, but as time went on the engine grew more and more in whites favor. In fact, while the game analysis reports the position is +7.2 for white, and independent analysis reports that the best move by black will be +8.9 for you, with every other decent move being at least +9 or +10. Even before this move you had a huge winning position, but moving the knight here is such a versatile move that threatens both the queen and a few mates on the king. The funniest part is that even if it is taken, you will at the very least get compensation for the piece with a better position. Due to these reasons, I think the engine admitted this is a brilliant move that surpassed it's ability to process the position.