Pin: king to c7
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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.
Trapped piece: an enemy piece has no safe squares — catch it.
Difficulty 2077 ShuffleRating — expert level — few solve it at first try.
Black 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.
A trapped piece has no safe square. Spot an enemy piece that has wandered offside or been hemmed in, then play the move that takes away its last escape and wins it — often a quiet pawn push or a covering minor piece.
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 a8, rook a1 e1, knight c3, pawn a2 b2 c2 f2 g2 d4.
Black: king d8, queen g5, rook h8, bishop h3 f8, knight c6, pawn e6 h6 a7.
11 white and 9 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 17.
The position in numbers
White are ahead by 2 points of material (28 against 26; 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 d8.
It is Black to move on move 17, with 4 legal replies to weigh — only the line that keeps the advantage solves the puzzle. Black are in check right now, so every reply must answer the check.
White keeps 6 pawns, Black 3. No file is fully open, so the heavy pieces have to be pried in. Half-open for Black: b, c, d, f, g.
Black hold the bishop pair, an edge in open lines. The Black king has 3 empty squares to step to right now — the fewer they are, the closer a mating net.
Solution & explanation
Main line
17... Kc7 18. g3 Bg7 19. Qxc6+ Kxc6
Why it works
- Great move! king to c7 keeps the pressure (+3.9).
- Well found: bishop to g7 (+4.6).
- Strong! king to c6 is the sharp choice (+4.9).
- You win a piece — the queen.
- If instead g3, then Bg7 and you stay on top.
Move by move
- 17… Kc7 — king to c7
- 18. g3 — pawn to g3
- Bg7 — bishop to g7
- 19. Qxc6+ — queen to c6 (capture) with check
- Kxc6 — king to c6 (capture)
Types in this puzzle
Discovered attack
A piece steps aside and opens a second attack from the piece behind it.
A discovered attack works like a curtain: one piece steps off the line and unveils the long-range piece behind it. The beauty is that the moving piece can create a second threat of its own — two attacks in one move. Look for your stacked pairs: a bishop or rook behind a knight or pawn, aimed through them at something valuable. Send the front piece to the most aggressive square — a discovery without a second threat wastes half its power.
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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