Pin: bishop to g5
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The tactical motive
Pin: a piece can't move without exposing something more valuable behind it.
Difficulty 2306 ShuffleRating — expert level — few solve it at first try.
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 h3, rook a1 h5, bishop d3 f4, pawn a2 b2 c2 f2 h2 c3 g3.
Black: king h8, queen f6, rook a8 f8, bishop f3, knight a5, pawn b6 d6 e6 h6 a7 c7 f7 g7.
13 white and 14 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 18.
The position in numbers
Black are ahead by 1 points of material (32 against 33; 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 h8.
It is White to move on move 18, with 43 legal replies to weigh — only the line that keeps the advantage solves the puzzle.
White keeps 7 pawns, Black 8. No file is fully open, so the heavy pieces have to be pried in. Half-open for White: d, e.
White 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
18. Bg5 Qxg5 19. Rxg5
Why it works
- Great move! bishop to g5 keeps the pressure (+4.3).
- Well found: rook to g5 (+4.7).
- You win a piece — the queen.
- If instead Qxg5, then Rxg5 and you win the queen.
Move by move
- 18. Bg5 — bishop to g5
- Qxg5 — queen to g5 (capture)
- 19. Rxg5 — rook to g5 (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.
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?
Provenance
Derived from the Lichess puzzle database (CC0).
Pack 015
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