Pin: queen to a1 (e5)
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The tactical motive
Pin: a piece can't move without exposing something more valuable behind it.
Difficulty 2491 ShuffleRating — expert level — few solve it at first try.
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 f1, queen f3, rook c4, bishop f2, pawn c2 h3 a4 e4 g4 b5 g5.
Black: king e6, queen e5, rook d2, knight e2, pawn h4 a7 b7 f7 g7.
11 white and 9 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 39.
The position in numbers
White are ahead by 2 points of material (24 against 22; pawn = 1, knight and bishop = 3, rook = 5, queen = 9) — the tactic has to convert or outweigh that.
The white king stands on f1, the black king on e6.
It is Black to move on move 39, with 40 legal replies to weigh — only the line that keeps the advantage solves the puzzle.
White keeps 7 pawns, Black 5. Files fully open (no pawns of either colour): d — natural highways for the rooks and queen. Half-open for Black: c, e.
The Black king has 3 empty squares to step to right now — the fewer they are, the closer a mating net.
Solution & explanation
Main line
39... Qa1+ 40. Kg2 Ng3 41. Qf5+ Nxf5
Why it works
- Great move! queen to a1 keeps the pressure (+6.4).
- Well found: knight to g3 (+6.8).
- Strong! knight to f5 is the sharp choice (+7.1).
- You win a piece — the queen.
- If instead Kg2, then Ng3 and you stay on top.
Move by move
- 39… Qa1+ — queen to a1 with check
- 40. Kg2 — king to g2
- Ng3 — knight to g3
- 41. Qf5+ — queen to f5 with check
- Nxf5 — knight to f5 (capture)
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.
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.
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.
Provenance
Derived from the Lichess puzzle database (CC0).
Pack 015
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