Pin: queen to f1 (g2)
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The tactical motive
Pin: a piece can't move without exposing something more valuable behind it.
Difficulty 1975 ShuffleRating — for advanced tacticians.
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.
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 d1, queen c4, rook a1 f1, bishop c1 e2, pawn a2 d2 f2 c3 a5 h5.
Black: king f6, queen g2, rook a8 h8, bishop g4, pawn e5 c6 a7 g7.
12 white and 9 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 23.
The position in numbers
White are ahead by 5 points of material (31 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 d1, the black king on f6.
It is Black to move on move 23, with 41 legal replies to weigh — only the line that keeps the advantage solves the puzzle.
White keeps 6 pawns, Black 4. Files fully open (no pawns of either colour): b — natural highways for the rooks and queen. Half-open for Black: d, f, h.
White 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
23... Qxf1+ 24. Kc2 Qxe2 25. Qxe2 Bxe2
Why it works
- Great move! queen to f1 keeps the pressure (+4.8).
- Well found: queen to e2 (+4.6).
- Strong! bishop to e2 is the sharp choice (+4.6).
- You win a piece — the queen.
- If instead Kc2, then Qxe2 and you win the rook.
Move by move
- 23… Qxf1+ — queen to f1 (capture) with check
- 24. Kc2 — king to c2
- Qxe2 — queen to e2 (capture)
- 25. Qxe2 — queen to e2 (capture)
- Bxe2 — bishop to e2 (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.
Counter-strike
Don't defend — answer the threat with a bigger one.
The counter-strike: instead of defending against the threat, you answer with a bigger threat of your own. While your opponent grabs a pawn, you deliver mate — the arithmetic favors you. Look for a counter when direct defenses fail: do you have a check, an attack on the queen, a mating threat? The beginner's error is meeting every threat with a reflexive defense without checking the counterattacking resources first.
Provenance
Derived from the Lichess puzzle database (CC0).
Pack 014
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