Win the hanging rook on e8
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The tactical motive
Hanging piece: your opponent left a piece undefended — take it.
Save the piece: one of your pieces is attacked — find the best way to rescue it.
Difficulty 1784 ShuffleRating — for advanced tacticians.
Black to move — find the best continuation
How to recognize this tactic
A hanging piece is one that is attacked and not defended, or defended too few times. Count attackers against defenders on each enemy unit; where attackers win, take it — often with an in-between move or a check to gain the extra tempo.
Here the task is defensive: one of your pieces is under attack and must be rescued without losing more. Look for a move that saves it with tempo — a counter-check, an equal counter-attack or an interposition — rather than a passive retreat.
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 a6, rook e8, pawn b5.
Black: king f4, rook e5.
3 white and 2 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 65.
The position in numbers
White are ahead by 1 points of material (6 against 5; pawn = 1, knight and bishop = 3, rook = 5, queen = 9) — the tactic has to convert or outweigh that.
The white king stands on a6, the black king on f4.
It is Black to move on move 65, with 20 legal replies to weigh — only the line that keeps the advantage solves the puzzle.
White keeps 1 pawns, Black 0. Files fully open (no pawns of either colour): a, c, d, e, f, g, h — natural highways for the rooks and queen. Half-open for Black: b.
The Black king has 7 empty squares to step to right now — the fewer they are, the closer a mating net.
Solution & explanation
Main line
65... Rxe8 66. Kb6 Ke5
Why it works
- Great move! rook to e8 keeps the pressure (+4.4).
- Well found: king to e5 (+4.7).
- You win a piece — the rook.
- If instead Kb6, then Ke5 and you win the rook.
Move by move
- 65… Rxe8 — rook to e8 (capture)
- 66. Kb6 — king to b6
- Ke5 — king to e5
Types in this puzzle
Winning blow
Find the strike that wins material by force.
A winning blow is a forced material gain that does not fit a single textbook motif. The general tactical recipe applies: spot loose pieces, an awkwardly placed king, overloaded lines. Go through the forcing moves in order of violence — checks, captures, threats — because most combinations start with one of them. Do not judge by feel: calculate the concrete line until the outcome is beyond doubt.
Rook endgame
The most common endgame — activity decides everything.
The rook endgame is the most common of all: rooks and pawns on the board. Its first law is activity — a rook behind a passed pawn beats a rook passively babysitting one. The sign of a correct plan is that your rook is attacking something, not guarding something. The typical error is locking your rook into defense: it is often better to give up a pawn and keep your rook and king active.
Save the piece
The attacked piece can be saved — with profit.
Saving the piece: one of your pieces is attacked, and the job is not to lose it for nothing. There are several tools: retreat with tempo, defend it, block the attack, or create a bigger counter-threat. Before retreating automatically, look for a retreat that attacks something — you save the piece and gain time in one move. The typical mistake is panicking onto the first available square, where the piece gets trapped again.
Provenance
Derived from the Lichess puzzle database (CC0).
Verified by Stockfish at depth 20+.
Solution forcedness confirmed (verified).
Pack 013
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