Deflection: rook to a6 (e6)
li-0I4xinaming tag (square·N)Opens in the app if installed, otherwise downloads the APK.
The tactical motive
Deflection: force the defender to abandon its post.
Difficulty 1975 ShuffleRating — for advanced tacticians.
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 g3, queen h7, rook e6, bishop g2, pawn c2 d3 c4 e4 g4 f5.
Black: king b8, queen d8, rook f8 g8, pawn a4 b4 d4 e5 f6.
10 white and 9 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 46.
The position in numbers
Black are ahead by 1 points of material (23 against 24; pawn = 1, knight and bishop = 3, rook = 5, queen = 9) — the tactic has to convert or outweigh that.
The white king stands on g3, the black king on b8.
It is White to move on move 46, with 36 legal replies to weigh — only the line that keeps the advantage solves the puzzle.
White keeps 6 pawns, Black 5. Files fully open (no pawns of either colour): h — natural highways for the rooks and queen. Half-open for White: a, b.
The White king has 5 empty squares to step to right now — the fewer they are, the closer a mating net.
Solution & explanation
Main line
46. Ra6 Qc7 47. Ra8+ Kxa8 48. Qxc7
Why it works
- Great move! rook to a6 keeps the pressure (+5.7).
- Well found: rook to a8 (+6.0).
- Strong! queen to c7 is the sharp choice (+6.3).
- You win a piece — the queen.
- If instead Qc7, then Ra8+ and you stay on top.
Move by move
- 46. Ra6 — rook to a6
- Qc7 — queen to c7
- 47. Ra8+ — rook to a8 with check
- Kxa8 — king to a8 (capture)
- 48. Qxc7 — queen to c7 (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.
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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