Pin: rook to c1
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The tactical motive
Pin: a piece can't move without exposing something more valuable behind it.
Difficulty 1765 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 g1, queen b7, rook f1, pawn b2 f2 g3 h3.
Black: king g8, queen d8, rook a2, pawn e5 b6 a7 f7 g7 h7.
7 white and 9 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 27.
The position in numbers
Black are ahead by 2 points of material (18 against 20; 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 27, with 30 legal replies to weigh — only the line that keeps the advantage solves the puzzle.
White keeps 4 pawns, Black 6. Files fully open (no pawns of either colour): c, d — natural highways for the rooks and queen. Half-open for White: a, e.
The White king has 3 empty squares to step to right now — the fewer they are, the closer a mating net.
Solution & explanation
Main line
27. Rc1 g6 28. Rc8 Qxc8 29. Qxc8+
Why it works
- Great move! rook to c1 keeps the pressure (+4.2).
- Well found: rook to c8 (+3.8).
- Strong! queen to c8 is the sharp choice (+3.9).
- You win a piece — the queen.
- If instead g6, then Rc8 and you stay on top.
Move by move
- 27. Rc1 — rook to c1
- g6 — pawn to g6
- 28. Rc8 — rook to c8
- Qxc8 — queen to c8 (capture)
- 29. Qxc8+ — queen to c8 (capture) with check
Types in this puzzle
Quiet move
No check, no capture — yet this modest move decides the game.
A quiet move gives no check and takes nothing — yet it decides the game by creating an unstoppable threat or stealing the king's last square. This is the hardest class of moves: the eye hunts for loud blows while a modest shift does the winning. The clue: every forcing try runs into a defense, so seek the move that strengthens the threat or takes squares away. Train yourself to ask: what if I neither capture nor check, but quietly improve?
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.
Provenance
Derived from the Lichess puzzle database (CC0).
Verified by Stockfish at depth 20+.
Solution forcedness confirmed (verified).
Pack 013
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