Pin: knight to e5
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The tactical motive
Pin: a piece can't move without exposing something more valuable behind it.
Difficulty 1902 ShuffleRating — for advanced tacticians.
White 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 h1, queen g4, rook c1 f1, bishop g5, knight f3 g3, pawn g2 h2 c3 b4 e4.
Black: king g8, queen c7, rook d7 f8, bishop b6 b7, knight e5, pawn b5 a6 e6 f7 g7 h7.
12 white and 13 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 (33 against 34; pawn = 1, knight and bishop = 3, rook = 5, queen = 9) — the tactic has to convert or outweigh that.
The white king stands on h1, the black king on g8.
It is White to move on move 29, with 35 legal replies to weigh — only the line that keeps the advantage solves the puzzle.
White keeps 5 pawns, Black 6. Files fully open (no pawns of either colour): d — natural highways for the rooks and queen. Half-open for White: a, f.
Black hold the bishop pair, an edge in open lines. The White king has 0 empty squares to step to right now — the fewer they are, the closer a mating net.
Solution & explanation
Main line
29. Nxe5 Qxe5 30. Bf6 Qxf6 31. Rxf6
Why it works
- Great move! knight to e5 keeps the pressure (+4.1).
- Well found: bishop to f6 (+4.5).
- Strong! rook to f6 is the sharp choice (+4.5).
- You win a piece — the queen.
- If instead Qxe5, then Bf6 and you stay on top.
Move by move
- 29. Nxe5 — knight to e5 (capture)
- Qxe5 — queen to e5 (capture)
- 30. Bf6 — bishop to f6
- Qxf6 — queen to f6 (capture)
- 31. Rxf6 — rook to f6 (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.
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).
Verified by Stockfish at depth 20+.
Solution forcedness confirmed (verified).
Pack 014
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