Pin: queen to g5
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The tactical motive
Pin: a piece can't move without exposing something more valuable behind it.
Difficulty 1916 ShuffleRating — for advanced tacticians.
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 h1, queen d2, rook f1, knight d4 h5, pawn a2 c2 g2 h2 b3 f5.
Black: king g8, queen d7, rook a8 e8, bishop d6, pawn c5 d5 a7 b7 f7 g7 h7.
11 white and 12 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 25.
The position in numbers
Black are ahead by 3 points of material (26 against 29; 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 g8.
It is White to move on move 25, with 42 legal replies to weigh — only the line that keeps the advantage solves the puzzle.
White keeps 6 pawns, Black 7. Files fully open (no pawns of either colour): e — natural highways for the rooks and queen. Half-open for White: d.
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. Qg5 Bf8 26. Nf6+ Kh8 27. Nxd7
Why it works
- Great move! queen to g5 keeps the pressure (+5.0).
- Well found: knight to f6 (+4.9).
- Strong! knight to d7 is the sharp choice (+5.2).
- You win a piece — the queen.
- If instead Bf8, then Nf6+ and you stay on top.
Move by move
- 25. Qg5 — queen to g5
- Bf8 — bishop to f8
- 26. Nf6+ — knight to f6 with check
- Kh8 — king to h8
- 27. Nxd7 — knight to d7 (capture)
Types in this puzzle
Royal fork
A fork with check: the king must move, and the second piece is lost.
A royal fork is a fork with check — one of the two targets is the king itself. The check must be answered first, so nobody is left to rescue the second piece. Look for squares where your piece gives check and simultaneously attacks an undefended queen or rook. It is the most reliable fork of all, because your opponent literally has no choice.
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 014
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