Pin: pawn to h6 (h5)
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The tactical motive
Pin: a piece can't move without exposing something more valuable behind it.
Save the piece: one of your pieces is attacked — find the best way to rescue it.
Difficulty 2392 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.
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 h2, queen f6, rook g2, pawn a2 f2 b4 h5.
Black: king g8, queen b5, rook d5 f8, pawn c3 g5 a7 f7.
7 white and 8 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 42.
The position in numbers
Black are ahead by 5 points of material (18 against 23; pawn = 1, knight and bishop = 3, rook = 5, queen = 9) — the tactic has to convert or outweigh that.
The white king stands on h2, the black king on g8.
It is White to move on move 42, with 32 legal replies to weigh — only the line that keeps the advantage solves the puzzle.
White keeps 4 pawns, Black 4. Files fully open (no pawns of either colour): d, e — natural highways for the rooks and queen. Half-open for White: c, g.
The White king has 4 empty squares to step to right now — the fewer they are, the closer a mating net.
Solution & explanation
Main line
42. h6 Qb8+ 43. f4 Qxf4+ 44. Qxf4
Why it works
- Great move! pawn to h6 keeps the pressure (+5.8).
- Well found: pawn to f4 (+5.8).
- Strong! queen to f4 is the sharp choice (+6.0).
- You win a piece — the queen.
- If instead Qb8+, then f4 and you stay on top.
Move by move
- 42. h6 — pawn to h6
- Qb8+ — queen to b8 with check
- 43. f4 — pawn to f4
- Qxf4+ — queen to f4 (capture) with check
- 44. Qxf4 — queen to f4 (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.
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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