Deflection: rook to e8 (e1)
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The tactical motive
Deflection: force the defender to abandon its post.
Difficulty 1111 ShuffleRating — club-player level.
White to move — find the best continuation
How to recognize this tactic
Deflection drags a defender away from its duty. Identify the enemy piece that guards a key square or mate, then force it to move — with a check, a capture or a threat it must answer — and strike where it no longer defends.
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 d3, rook e1, pawn a2 f2 g3 h3.
Black: king g8, queen d5, rook d8, pawn f5 b6 g6 a7 h7.
7 white and 8 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 29.
The position in numbers
Black are ahead by 1 points of material (18 against 19; 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 g8.
It is White to move on move 29, with 38 legal replies to weigh — only the line that keeps the advantage solves the puzzle.
White keeps 4 pawns, Black 5. Files fully open (no pawns of either colour): c, d, e — natural highways for the rooks and queen. Half-open for White: b.
The White king has 2 empty squares to step to right now — the fewer they are, the closer a mating net.
Solution & explanation
Main line
29. Re8+ Rxe8 30. Qxd5+
Why it works
- Great move! rook to e8 keeps the pressure (+5.4).
- Well found: queen to d5 (+5.2).
- You win a piece — the queen.
- If instead Rxe8, then Qxd5+ and you win the queen.
Move by move
- 29. Re8+ — rook to e8 with check
- Rxe8 — rook to e8 (capture)
- 30. Qxd5+ — queen to d5 (capture) with check
Types in this puzzle
Deflection
Force the defender away from its duty — then strike what it guarded.
Deflection forces the guard to leave its post: a sacrifice or exchange drags it away from the piece or square it protects. First find the critical defender — the piece whose absence makes the mate or the material win possible. Then find the move it cannot ignore, which is usually a capture. Do not be stingy: if removing the guard wins the queen or mates, the sacrifice pays for itself many times over.
Counter-strike
Don't defend — answer the threat with a bigger one.
The counter-strike: instead of defending against the threat, you answer with a bigger threat of your own. While your opponent grabs a pawn, you deliver mate — the arithmetic favors you. Look for a counter when direct defenses fail: do you have a check, an attack on the queen, a mating threat? The beginner's error is meeting every threat with a reflexive defense without checking the counterattacking resources first.
Check chase
Every move is a check — the king is chased into losing ground.
In a check chase every one of your moves is a check, so the opponent never gets a free second. The king is herded across the board until it loses a piece or walks into a decisive blow. Such lines are the easiest to calculate: each check allows only a handful of replies, so try them all. Make it a habit to start calculating any sharp position with the checks — they are the most forcing moves on the board.
Provenance
Derived from the Lichess puzzle database (CC0).
Verified by Stockfish at depth 20+.
Solution forcedness confirmed (verified).
Pack 007
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