There are lots of situations where a promotion to a queen would result in stalemate (draw) so a promotion to rook or other piece gets away form this. I'd say Rook would be most common, but some special (problem?) positions a knight or bishop could solve the problem with a mate or a nice fork. E.g. promote to a night with check and an attack on the opponents queen.
It's interesting that all these positions are called "common", but the actual board position might happen zero to one times in a lifetime, and I suspect it's usually zero times.
I noticed something similar when I played contract bridge at a competitive level. A top bridge player might play very roughly on the order of 10,000 hands a year, and vividly recall something that happens on the order of once a year as "oh yeah that's common". Of course I wasn't remotely close to them. But there is something about competitive games that seem to amplify the memory for certain kinds of unusual situations.
(Some people are commenting about under promoting to avoid stalemate traps down the line. I've always been a weak chess player, but... trying to set a stalemate trap after being down a queen, in a non-contrived position, is, like, adult chess players shouldn't do that. In my limited experience.)
Nowadays there are tournament matches with no resignations allowed, so setting stalemate traps may be more common from now on.
> vividly recall something that happens on the order of once a year as "oh yeah that's common".
I mean, think of how many times a typical person has sex in their life. Hopefully they and their partner aren't getting pregnant more than roughly once per year. But somebody getting pregnant after having sex is reasonably defined as common. Certainly common enough that it's something you would consider and take precautions to prevent if you didn't want it to happen.
In ranked chess games, underpromotion happens about 1 in 1000ish games. I imagine it would be more common in high level unranked play. If you play one chess game per day, that's once every 3 years on average. It's not frequent, but I'd describe that as common.
Knight promotion because it's the best piece in the situation happens often. Rook promotion because Queen promotion would be stalemate happens occasionally. Bishop promotion is a theoretical curiosity only.
This post ends with a situation in a real tournament game where a bishop promotion is the only winning move
https://timkr.home.xs4all.nl/chess2/minor.htm
Well, maybe. There's no full record of the game, it's not even clear which year it supposedly took place in. It could have been a real tournament game, but I don't think there's enough evidence to reasonably conclude that it was.
Just to pile on, a common trick is to sac a queen for say a minor piece, then after king takes queen, a pawn is promoted to a knight with check and a fork on the queen. After the dust settles, a player is up a minor piece.
A knight will attack different squares than a queen so promoting to a knight of course makes obvious sense in situations that warrant.
A rook or a bishop attack a subset of squares that a queen does, so why would you ever pick one of them instead of a queen? To avoid the stalemate where your opponent is not in check but has no legal moves.
For not proffesional players (i.e. me) when there are only one or two pawn and the kings, it's better to get a rock.
With a queen it's too easy to make a mistake and get a draw because the other player can't move.
I’ve done this too often, now I always get rook unless the board is nearly empty.
The juiciest one is the Albin Counter-gambit. If you follow the "ideal line" where white blunders and takes the bishop bait, there's a neat knight underpromotion to win a queen.
From my own play, I typically see knight f3 from white on move 4, which still results in interesting games.
> There are lots of situations where a promotion to a queen would result in stalemate
You disagree with their 'rare' then where is your analysis?
You gave zero numbers or evidence, you're just saying stuff that pops into your head.
This analysis is a 35 to 1 for queens, knights arethe most popular alternative but I don't believe they played out the opponent resigns which most people do before the promotion to queen or analysised shit/fun playing -
https://blog.ebemunk.com/visual-look-at-2-million-chess-game...