An easy way to figure out how many moves it'll take a knight to a given square

A lot of you already probably know this, but for those who don't, this is an easy way to find out how many moves it takes a knight to get to a square.

I was looking through the Wikipedia page for knight and I found this diagram:

http://i.imgur.com/zPqUC.png

The diagram shows how many moves it'll take a knight to get from its current square to any square on the board.

The pattern is surprisingly easy to remember. From the wiki page:

In the diagram, the numbers represent how many moves it takes for a knight to reach each square on the chess board from its location on the f5 square. Observing and even memorizing the patterns (diagonally 2-4-2-4-2-4, horizontally and vertically 3-2-3-2-3-2) helps a player to manoeuvre his knight and to avoid his pieces being attacked by an enemy knight.

So you just have to remember that squares diagonal to the knight go 2-4-2-4-2-4, and squares horizontal and vertical to the knight go 3-2-3-2-3-2.

Cool, thanks for the link

And whatever color the knight is on, is the color it will be attacking on it's next move.

Thank you for the tip!

This reminds me of something that Staunton taught, that has helped me in many a time scramble.  If your king is being harassed by a knight, move your king two squares away on the same diagonal as the knight, and the knight will have to make three moves before it can attack the king again.

This is sort of like those cheap methods developed for showing where the ladder will end up in go strategy. 

You should rely on your own judgement. Putting trust into some obtuse method is not going to help your game.

I have tried applying such systems in my games and lost everytime.

Very cool post.    Any other diagrams you saw that were similar?

There's also a coloured version here:

http://i.imgur.com/nK09q.png

Makes the pattern a little easier to see.

Cool!

Yes, a knight clearly needs 2 moves to get from a1 to h8.

Nice catch Maarten, not even mentioning that it can't go neither from a1 to b2 in 2 moves. The graph just illustrates a particular case, ignoring other particular cases.

Also this pattern doesn't say anything about for example moving from a1 to d2. Counting is probably easier... It might actually be a nice knight's jump visualization exercise! For example, without a board, find a fastest route from a3 to h6 (a3-c4-e5-g4-h6)

Great!! it was very useful for me. thanks a lot

 Thank you for posting this!   Very helpful.

Thanks for the very useful link!

The figure is not available in the English Wikipedia page for Knight at this time, but I found something even better in the German Wikipedia:  Knight_d4_moves.png

Not only does this one have the minimum number of moves needed to go from d4 to each square, written in the squares, but it also has the count of how many different ways one can do so (using the minimum number of moves).

So is 4 the most moves it could take for a Knight to get anywhere on the board? This diagram is super useful but I get tripped up when it's not a square that's a direct line (diagonal, vertical, horizontal). 

In my diagram, how many moves does it take the b7 Knight get to g1? Thanks

Thank you for that.

howbout the ones dn at the carousel ? they move but then they never do...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-EKGsrq39E

https://knight-moves-visualiser.vercel.app/

i saw this post a couple of weeks back and thought the idea was cool so here is something i made