Rescue the knight to f7
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The tactical motive
Save the piece: one of your pieces is attacked — find the best way to rescue it.
Difficulty 2132 ShuffleRating — expert level — few solve it at first try.
Black to move — find the best continuation
How to recognize this tactic
Here the task is defensive: one of your pieces is under attack and must be rescued without losing more. Look for a move that saves it with tempo — a counter-check, an equal counter-attack or an interposition — rather than a passive retreat.
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 f1 f7, bishop g2, knight c2 h6, pawn a2 b2 c3 h3 e4.
Black: king g7, queen c7, rook a7 h8, bishop c6, knight e5, pawn b4 c5 a6 g6.
12 white and 10 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 28.
The position in numbers
White are ahead by 4 points of material (33 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 g1, the black king on g7.
It is Black to move on move 28, with 2 legal replies to weigh — only the line that keeps the advantage solves the puzzle. Black are in check right now, so every reply must answer the check.
White keeps 5 pawns, Black 4. Files fully open (no pawns of either colour): d, f — natural highways for the rooks and queen. Half-open for Black: e, h.
The Black king has 0 empty squares to step to right now — the fewer they are, the closer a mating net.
Solution & explanation
Main line
28... Nxf7 29. Qf6+ Kxh6 30. Rf4 Kh7
Why it works
- Great move! knight to f7 keeps the pressure (+1.9).
- Well found: king to h6 (+1.7).
- Strong! king to h7 is the sharp choice (+1.7).
- You win a piece — the rook.
- If instead Qf6+, then Kxh6 and you win the rook.
Move by move
- 28… Nxf7 — knight to f7 (capture)
- 29. Qf6+ — queen to f6 with check
- Kxh6 — king to h6 (capture)
- 30. Rf4 — rook to f4
- Kh7 — king to h7
Types in this puzzle
Winning blow
Find the strike that wins material by force.
A winning blow is a forced material gain that does not fit a single textbook motif. The general tactical recipe applies: spot loose pieces, an awkwardly placed king, overloaded lines. Go through the forcing moves in order of violence — checks, captures, threats — because most combinations start with one of them. Do not judge by feel: calculate the concrete line until the outcome is beyond doubt.
Save the piece
The attacked piece can be saved — with profit.
Saving the piece: one of your pieces is attacked, and the job is not to lose it for nothing. There are several tools: retreat with tempo, defend it, block the attack, or create a bigger counter-threat. Before retreating automatically, look for a retreat that attacks something — you save the piece and gain time in one move. The typical mistake is panicking onto the first available square, where the piece gets trapped again.
King evacuation
The king walks out of the danger zone on its own feet.
King evacuation: when the shelter collapses, the king walks out of the attack on his own feet — sometimes across half the board. A series of precise king moves carries him out of the firing zone, and the enemy attack dissolves. The signs: no direct defense works, but there is a route over unattacked squares to a quiet corner. Calculate the entire journey in advance — a king stranded halfway usually dies there.
Provenance
Derived from the Lichess puzzle database (CC0).
Pack 015
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