Pin: rook to f4
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The tactical motive
Pin: a piece can't move without exposing something more valuable behind it.
Difficulty 1838 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 h2, queen f7, rook f6, pawn a2 b2 c2 f2 d3 g3 h3.
Black: king h6, queen e2, rook e1 e8, pawn a4 d4 g6 h7.
10 white and 8 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 32.
The position in numbers
Black are ahead by 2 points of material (21 against 23; pawn = 1, knight and bishop = 3, rook = 5, queen = 9) — the tactic has to convert or outweigh that.
The white king stands on h2, the black king on h6.
It is White to move on move 32, with 32 legal replies to weigh — only the line that keeps the advantage solves the puzzle.
White keeps 7 pawns, Black 4. Files fully open (no pawns of either colour): e — natural highways for the rooks and queen.
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
32. Rf4 Qh5 33. Rh4 Qxh4 34. gxh4
Why it works
- Great move! rook to f4 keeps the pressure (+3.5).
- Well found: rook to h4 (+3.6).
- Strong! pawn to h4 is the sharp choice (+3.8).
- You win a piece — the queen.
- If instead Qh5, then Rh4 and you stay on top.
Move by move
- 32. Rf4 — rook to f4
- Qh5 — queen to h5
- 33. Rh4 — rook to h4
- Qxh4 — queen to h4 (capture)
- 34. gxh4 — pawn to h4 (capture)
Types in this puzzle
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?
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.
Provenance
Derived from the Lichess puzzle database (CC0).
Pack 013
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