Mate in 2: discovered attack on d1
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The tactical motive
Discovered attack: one piece steps aside, unleashing another's attack.
Mate in 2: the first move creates an unstoppable threat, the second delivers mate.
Difficulty 1902 ShuffleRating — for advanced tacticians.
Black to move — find the best continuation
How to recognize this tactic
A discovered attack fires when one piece steps aside and unmasks the piece behind it. Look for your own units that block a rook, bishop or queen: moving the front piece — ideally with a threat of its own — springs two attacks in one move.
Mate in two usually opens with a forcing move — a check, a capture or an unstoppable threat — that strips the king of squares or defenders, so the follow-up mate becomes unavoidable. Look for the first move that leaves the opponent only losing replies.
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 c2, queen g2, bishop d3 f4, knight d2, pawn b2 h2 a3 c3 g3 d4 g7.
Black: king g8, rook e1 f8, bishop g4, knight c6, pawn b5 d5 a6 c7 f7 h7.
12 white and 11 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 20.
The position in numbers
White are ahead by 3 points of material (25 against 22; pawn = 1, knight and bishop = 3, rook = 5, queen = 9) — the tactic has to convert or outweigh that.
The white king stands on c2, the black king on g8.
It is Black to move on move 20, with 43 legal replies to weigh — only the line that keeps the advantage solves the puzzle.
White keeps 7 pawns, Black 6. Files fully open (no pawns of either colour): e — natural highways for the rooks and queen. Half-open for Black: g.
White hold the bishop pair, an edge in open lines. The Black king has 1 empty squares to step to right now — the fewer they are, the closer a mating net.
Solution & explanation
Main line
20... Bd1+ 21. Kb1 Bb3#
Why it works
- Great move! bishop to d1 keeps the pressure (#1).
- Well found: bishop to b3 (#).
- The line ends in a forced mate in 2.
- If instead Kb1, then Bb3# and it is mate.
Move by move
- 20… Bd1+ — bishop to d1 with check
- 21. Kb1 — king to b1
- Bb3# — bishop to b3 and it is checkmate
Types in this puzzle
Discovered mate
A piece steps aside — and the one behind it delivers mate.
In a discovered mate the piece that moves is not the one that mates — the long-range piece behind it delivers the blow. The moving piece is completely free: it can land anywhere, ideally stealing the king's last squares or guarding key points. Look for your rook, bishop or queen lined up with the enemy king, with exactly one of your own pieces in between. When choosing the unveiling move, remember its second job — shutting the king's escape door.
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.
Mate in 2
A forced checkmate in two moves.
Mate in two: your move, any reply, then the mating blow. Start with the most forcing first moves — checks and sacrifices that shrink the opponent's options to almost nothing. Against every single reply you must have a mate ready, so check them all without exception. The common failure is analyzing the pretty defense and forgetting the boring one.
Provenance
Derived from the Lichess puzzle database (CC0).
Pack 014
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