Rescue the queen to f5
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The tactical motive
Save the piece: one of your pieces is attacked — find the best way to rescue it.
Difficulty 1947 ShuffleRating — for advanced tacticians.
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 d6, rook e1, knight f5, pawn h2 c3 g3 a4 d5.
Black: king e8, queen e4, rook c8, knight d7, pawn e3 a7 b7 g7 h7.
9 white and 9 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 30.
The position in numbers
Material is level — 22 points of pieces on each side (pawn = 1, knight and bishop = 3, rook = 5, queen = 9).
The white king stands on g1, the black king on e8.
It is Black to move on move 30, with 43 legal replies to weigh — only the line that keeps the advantage solves the puzzle.
White keeps 5 pawns, Black 5. Files fully open (no pawns of either colour): f — natural highways for the rooks and queen. Half-open for Black: c, d.
The Black king has 2 empty squares to step to right now — the fewer they are, the closer a mating net.
Solution & explanation
Main line
30... Qxf5 31. Rxe3+ Kd8
Why it works
- Great move! queen to f5 keeps the pressure (+2.9).
- Well found: king to d8 (+2.9).
- You reach a winning position (+2.9).
- If instead Rxe3+, then Kd8 and you stay on top.
Move by move
- 30… Qxf5 — queen to f5 (capture)
- 31. Rxe3+ — rook to e3 (capture) with check
- Kd8 — king to d8
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.
Provenance
Derived from the Lichess puzzle database (CC0).
Pack 014
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