Rescue the rook to f6
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The tactical motive
Save the piece: one of your pieces is attacked — find the best way to rescue it.
Difficulty 2564 ShuffleRating — expert level — few solve it at first try.
Black 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 g1, queen d7, rook d5, pawn a2 b2 f2 e3 g3 c4.
Black: king g7, queen f3, rook e6, pawn c5 g5 a6 b6 c7 f7.
9 white and 9 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 33.
The position in numbers
Material is level — 20 points of pieces on each side (pawn = 1, knight and bishop = 3, rook = 5, queen = 9).
The white king stands on g1, the black king on g7.
It is Black to move on move 33, with 35 legal replies to weigh — only the line that keeps the advantage solves the puzzle.
White keeps 6 pawns, Black 6. Files fully open (no pawns of either colour): d, h — natural highways for the rooks and queen. Half-open for Black: e.
The Black king has 7 empty squares to step to right now — the fewer they are, the closer a mating net.
Solution & explanation
Main line
33... Rf6 34. Rxg5+ Kh6 35. Qd2 Kxg5
Why it works
- Great move! rook to f6 keeps the pressure (+5.3).
- Well found: king to h6 (+5.4).
- Strong! king to g5 is the sharp choice (+6.1).
- You win a piece — the rook.
- If instead Rxg5+, then Kh6 and you stay on top.
Move by move
- 33… Rf6 — rook to f6
- 34. Rxg5+ — rook to g5 (capture) with check
- Kh6 — king to h6
- 35. Qd2 — queen to d2
- Kxg5 — king to g5 (capture)
Types in this puzzle
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?
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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