Pin: knight to h4 (f5)
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The tactical motive
Pin: a piece can't move without exposing something more valuable behind it.
Difficulty 1955 ShuffleRating — for advanced tacticians.
Black to move — find the best continuation
How to recognize this tactic
A pin freezes a piece in front of a more valuable one behind it. Scan the ranks, files and diagonals your bishop, rook or queen controls: if an enemy piece cannot move without exposing its king or queen, it is pinned and can be piled on or bypassed.
General method: before you move, list the forcing candidates — every check, every capture, every direct threat — and calculate those first. The solution to a tactic is almost always among them.
Position on the board
White: king g1, queen f4, rook a1 f1, knight b1 e5, pawn a2 c2 d2 f2 h2 b3 g3 e4.
Black: king c8, queen h3, rook g8 h8, bishop c6, knight f5, pawn d4 a7 b7 c7 f7 h7.
14 white and 12 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 18.
The position in numbers
White are ahead by 2 points of material (33 against 31; pawn = 1, knight and bishop = 3, rook = 5, queen = 9) — the tactic has to convert or outweigh that.
The white king stands on g1, the black king on c8.
It is Black to move on move 18, with 39 legal replies to weigh — only the line that keeps the advantage solves the puzzle.
White keeps 8 pawns, Black 6. No file is fully open, so the heavy pieces have to be pried in. Half-open for Black: e, g.
The Black king has 2 empty squares to step to right now — the fewer they are, the closer a mating net.
Solution & explanation
Main line
18... Nh4 19. Qxh4 Qxh4
Why it works
- Great move! knight to h4 keeps the pressure (+5.2).
- Well found: queen to h4 (+4.8).
- You win a piece — the queen.
- If instead Qxh4, then Qxh4 and you win the queen.
Move by move
- 18… Nh4 — knight to h4
- 19. Qxh4 — queen to h4 (capture)
- Qxh4 — queen to h4 (capture)
Types in this puzzle
Absolute pin
A piece is pinned against its king — it cannot legally move.
An absolute pin freezes a piece on the line between its own king and your long-range attacker: moving it is simply illegal. The pattern is three units on one straight line — your bishop, rook or queen, an enemy piece, and the enemy king behind it. A pinned piece neither attacks nor defends anything: treat it as if it were off the board. Pile up on it, ideally with a pawn, because running away is against the rules.
Only move
Everything else loses — find the only move that holds.
An only move is a position where everything loses except one single continuation. You cannot play "by hand" here: run through fundamentally different defenses — run away, block, trade, counterattack — and discard the ones that fail. The hallmark of these puzzles is that the obvious moves lose quickly while the solution often looks strange. First understand exactly what the threat is — then the one saving move reveals itself.
Quiet move
No check, no capture — yet this modest move decides the game.
A quiet move gives no check and takes nothing — yet it decides the game by creating an unstoppable threat or stealing the king's last square. This is the hardest class of moves: the eye hunts for loud blows while a modest shift does the winning. The clue: every forcing try runs into a defense, so seek the move that strengthens the threat or takes squares away. Train yourself to ask: what if I neither capture nor check, but quietly improve?
Provenance
Derived from the Lichess puzzle database (CC0).
Verified by Stockfish at depth 20+.
Solution forcedness confirmed (verified).
Pack 014
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