Deflection: pawn to e6
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The tactical motive
Deflection: force the defender to abandon its post.
Difficulty 2037 ShuffleRating — expert level — few solve it at first try.
White to move — find the best continuation
How to recognize this tactic
Deflection drags a defender away from its duty. Identify the enemy piece that guards a key square or mate, then force it to move — with a check, a capture or a threat it must answer — and strike where it no longer defends.
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 h1, queen g4, rook d1 g1, bishop e3, pawn b2 f2 h2 a3 e5.
Black: king h8, queen d7, rook a4 f5, knight e8, pawn d5 b6 h6 b7 c7 g7.
10 white and 11 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 25.
The position in numbers
Black are ahead by 1 points of material (27 against 28; pawn = 1, knight and bishop = 3, rook = 5, queen = 9) — the tactic has to convert or outweigh that.
The white king stands on h1, the black king on h8.
It is White to move on move 25, with 46 legal replies to weigh — only the line that keeps the advantage solves the puzzle.
White keeps 5 pawns, Black 6. No file is fully open, so the heavy pieces have to be pried in. Half-open for White: c, d, g.
The White king has 1 empty squares to step to right now — the fewer they are, the closer a mating net.
Solution & explanation
Main line
25. e6 Qxe6 26. Qxa4
Why it works
- Great move! pawn to e6 keeps the pressure (+4.1).
- Well found: queen to a4 (+4.3).
- You win a piece — the rook.
- If instead Qxe6, then Qxa4 and you win the rook.
Move by move
- 25. e6 — pawn to e6
- Qxe6 — queen to e6 (capture)
- 26. Qxa4 — queen to a4 (capture)
Types in this puzzle
Deflection
Force the defender away from its duty — then strike what it guarded.
Deflection forces the guard to leave its post: a sacrifice or exchange drags it away from the piece or square it protects. First find the critical defender — the piece whose absence makes the mate or the material win possible. Then find the move it cannot ignore, which is usually a capture. Do not be stingy: if removing the guard wins the queen or mates, the sacrifice pays for itself many times over.
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?
Provenance
Derived from the Lichess puzzle database (CC0).
Pack 014
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