Pin: bishop to h5
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The tactical motive
Pin: a piece can't move without exposing something more valuable behind it.
Difficulty 2108 ShuffleRating — expert level — few solve it at first try.
White 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 g1, queen h4, rook a1 h7, bishop d1, pawn a2 b2 g2 e3 h3 d5.
Black: king f7, queen g6, rook a8 f8, knight d2 c4, pawn b4 e5 a6 d6 f6 c7 g7.
11 white and 13 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 25.
The position in numbers
Black are ahead by 4 points of material (28 against 32; 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 f7.
It is White to move on move 25, with 34 legal replies to weigh — only the line that keeps the advantage solves the puzzle.
White keeps 6 pawns, Black 7. No file is fully open, so the heavy pieces have to be pried in. Half-open for White: c, f.
The White king has 3 empty squares to step to right now — the fewer they are, the closer a mating net.
Solution & explanation
Main line
25. Bh5 Nf3+ 26. Bxf3 Qg5 27. Qxc4
Why it works
- Great move! bishop to h5 keeps the pressure (+3.6).
- Well found: bishop to f3 (+3.9).
- Strong! queen to c4 is the sharp choice (+3.7).
- You win a piece — the knight.
- If instead Nf3+, then Bxf3 and you win the knight.
Move by move
- 25. Bh5 — bishop to h5
- Nf3+ — knight to f3 with check
- 26. Bxf3 — bishop to f3 (capture)
- Qg5 — queen to g5
- 27. Qxc4 — queen to c4 (capture)
Types in this puzzle
Overload
One defender guards two things — it cannot do both jobs.
Overloading exploits a defender with two jobs at once — guarding a piece and covering a mating square, for instance. It cannot do both: your first strike forces it to handle one duty and abandon the other. Find the overworked piece by asking what happens to each of its charges if it gets distracted. Then hit one target and collect the other — an overloaded defender only pretends to defend.
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.
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 015
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