Win the hanging queen on c7
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The tactical motive
Hanging piece: your opponent left a piece undefended — take it.
Save the piece: one of your pieces is attacked — find the best way to rescue it.
Difficulty 2596 ShuffleRating — expert level — few solve it at first try.
Black to move — find the best continuation
How to recognize this tactic
A hanging piece is one that is attacked and not defended, or defended too few times. Count attackers against defenders on each enemy unit; where attackers win, take it — often with an in-between move or a check to gain the extra tempo.
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 h3, rook f1 f4, bishop g4, knight c7, pawn a2 g2 h2 c4 e4.
Black: king g8, queen g7, rook a8 f8, bishop b2, knight c6, pawn b6 d6 g6 a7 h7.
11 white and 11 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 26.
The position in numbers
Material is level — 30 points of pieces on each side (pawn = 1, knight and bishop = 3, rook = 5, queen = 9).
The white king stands on h1, the black king on g8.
It is Black to move on move 26, with 44 legal replies to weigh — only the line that keeps the advantage solves the puzzle.
White keeps 5 pawns, Black 5. Files fully open (no pawns of either colour): f — natural highways for the rooks and queen. Half-open for Black: c, e.
The Black king has 1 empty squares to step to right now — the fewer they are, the closer a mating net.
Solution & explanation
Main line
26... Qxc7 27. Be6+ Kg7
Why it works
- Great move! queen to c7 keeps the pressure (+3.0).
- Well found: king to g7 (+3.1).
- You win a piece — the knight.
- If instead Be6+, then Kg7 and you win the knight.
Move by move
- 26… Qxc7 — queen to c7 (capture)
- 27. Be6+ — bishop to e6 with check
- Kg7 — king to g7
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.
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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