Rescue the pawn to b3
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The tactical motive
Save the piece: one of your pieces is attacked — find the best way to rescue it.
Difficulty 1608 ShuffleRating — for advanced tacticians.
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 b1, queen d2, rook d1, pawn c2 f7.
Black: king f8, queen b4, rook b3, pawn a3 d4 a5 g5.
5 white and 7 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 49.
The position in numbers
Black are ahead by 2 points of material (16 against 18; pawn = 1, knight and bishop = 3, rook = 5, queen = 9) — the tactic has to convert or outweigh that.
The white king stands on b1, the black king on f8.
It is White to move on move 49, 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 2 pawns, Black 4. Files fully open (no pawns of either colour): b, e, h — natural highways for the rooks and queen. Half-open for White: a, d, g.
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
49. cxb3 Qxb3+ 50. Ka1
Why it works
- Great move! pawn to b3 keeps the pressure (+3.6).
- Well found: king to a1 (+4.0).
- You win a piece — the rook.
- If instead Qxb3+, then Ka1 and you win the rook.
Move by move
- 49. cxb3 — pawn to b3 (capture)
- Qxb3+ — queen to b3 (capture) with check
- 50. Ka1 — king to a1
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.
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).
Verified by Stockfish at depth 20+.
Solution forcedness confirmed (verified).
Pack 011
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