Rescue the bishop to g4
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The tactical motive
Save the piece: one of your pieces is attacked — find the best way to rescue it.
Difficulty 1509 ShuffleRating — club-player level.
White to move — find the best continuation
How to recognize this tactic
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 f3, rook c8, bishop f5, knight e5, pawn d3 g3 f4.
Black: king h7, queen h5, rook h2, pawn d4 g6 h6.
7 white and 6 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 50.
The position in numbers
Black are ahead by 3 points of material (14 against 17; pawn = 1, knight and bishop = 3, rook = 5, queen = 9) — the tactic has to convert or outweigh that.
The white king stands on f3, the black king on h7.
It is White to move on move 50, with 4 legal replies to weigh — only the line that keeps the advantage solves the puzzle. White are in check right now, so every reply must answer the check.
White keeps 3 pawns, Black 3. Files fully open (no pawns of either colour): a, b, c, e — natural highways for the rooks and queen. Half-open for White: h.
The White king has 1 empty squares to step to right now — the fewer they are, the closer a mating net.
Solution & explanation
Main line
50. Bg4 Rf2+ 51. Kxf2
Why it works
- Great move! bishop to g4 keeps the pressure (+3.4).
- Well found: king to f2 (+3.6).
- You win a piece — the rook.
- If instead Rf2+, then Kxf2 and you win the rook.
Move by move
- 50. Bg4 — bishop to g4
- Rf2+ — rook to f2 with check
- 51. Kxf2 — king to f2 (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.
Blocking save
Block the check with tempo — and turn the game around.
The blocking save: you interpose a piece against the check — not passively, but with tempo, so the blocker creates a threat of its own. Such a block turns defense into attack. Whenever you are checked, compare all three replies — capture, move the king, interpose — and among the interpositions hunt for the one that counterattacks. The mistake is automatically stepping aside with the king when an active block would have turned the game around.
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 011
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