Fork: knight to c4 (d2)
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The tactical motive
Fork: one piece attacks two targets at once — they can't both be saved.
Save the piece: one of your pieces is attacked — find the best way to rescue it.
Difficulty 2107 ShuffleRating — expert level — few solve it at first try.
White to move — find the best continuation
How to recognize this tactic
A fork is one piece attacking two targets at once. Look for a knight, pawn or queen move that lands where it hits the king (or a bigger piece) and a second undefended unit on the same turn — the opponent can save only one.
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 h1, queen c2, bishop e3, knight d2, pawn a2 b2 g2 h2 d4.
Black: king g8, queen b6, bishop e5 b7, pawn b4 e4 e6 g6 f7 h7.
9 white and 10 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 27.
The position in numbers
Black are ahead by 1 points of material (20 against 21; 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 27, with 34 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): c — natural highways for the rooks and queen. Half-open for White: e, f.
Black hold the bishop pair, an edge in open lines. 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
27. Nc4 Qb5 28. dxe5 Bd5 29. b3
Why it works
- Great move! knight to c4 keeps the pressure (+3.9).
- Well found: pawn to e5 (+4.1).
- Strong! pawn to b3 is the sharp choice (+4.3).
- You win a piece — the bishop.
- If instead Qb5, then dxe5 and you win the bishop.
Move by move
- 27. Nc4 — knight to c4
- Qb5 — queen to b5
- 28. dxe5 — pawn to e5 (capture)
- Bd5 — bishop to d5
- 29. b3 — pawn to b3
Types in this puzzle
Knight fork
One knight move attacks two targets at once — the opponent can only save one.
A fork is one move that attacks two targets at once, and no piece forks better than the knight. Look through the knight's eyes: it jumps in an L and never moves along straight lines, which is exactly why its threats get missed. Both victims of a knight fork always stand on squares of one color, while the knight strikes from the opposite color. Hunt for the square from which the knight hits the king and a heavy piece at once.
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.
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).
Pack 015
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