Go for material or go for the mate?

On move 19, I was faced with the choice: 1) move my knight to fork the opponents rooks and bishop or 2) take the knight in an even exchange because it is defending the king. Please react with "thinking" to vote for the knight fork and "horsey" to vote for exchanging the knight. I didn't notice this choice until I went back and analyzed the game. Later, on move 23 I opted to protect against mate in one rather than rook takes pawn to attack the king. Since my bishops had site of both the g and h files, I definitely should have taken both pawns and exchanged bishop and rook for the queen. But, I am more interested in the debate between the knight fork and the knight exchange. Here is the game:

Knight fork and take his galactic lightsquare bishop!

You are a piece up, anything is good.

Like pawnaway said, it doesn't matter too much here. The computer likes the fork and I agree, a bishop/queen attack is black's only major threat, and the knight isn't tremendously helpful on kingside, in fact it's blocking the black queen from defending. You can pin it with the bishop and load up the queen and still have a nasty attack.

Black could have put up more of a fight by unpinning the king to be able to block with the g pawn.

Thanks for the replies and for the votes. Seems like the general consensus is to fork the rooks and bishop and then take the bishop. I guess taking the bishop is kind of an implied follow on choice, so even though one of the rooks is worth more, it really wouldn't be used until the end game, whereas the bishop would be more active during the middle game. I am also deriving from this that I would need to attempt to convert to a checkmate as soon as possible rather than allow the rooks to enter the game.

I'm trying my best not to be snarky, but if you are looking to improve you should look earlier in the game. The far more important positions are on moves 10, 15 and 17.

Also, you shouldn't necessarily go for the quickest wins. Computers do that, but they don't miscalculate in complicated positions like humans do. You might also want to take a look at your time management, ¨¨¨¨¨¨¨8 minutes remaining in a 10+5 game is a bit too much.

@pawnaway Thanks for the observations and analysis for the earlier moves. Admittedly my biggest flaw is that I tend to play too quickly without considering all my best options. On move 10, my thought process was: if I push my pawn, will my opponent trap their bishop? Relying on a rather obvious blunder rather than looking for better moves. I developed a bad habit of moving too quickly. Prior to online chess, during casual over the board games, moving quickly seemed to intimidate some opponents.

Playing fast is not that beneficial, especially in thoughtful games.

It has happened to everyone that they are playing, and when they start to win they sometimes get excited.

This is a factor by which some lose games won, so you have to play thinking.