Rescue the queen to e4
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The tactical motive
Save the piece: one of your pieces is attacked — find the best way to rescue it.
Difficulty 2176 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 b5, rook b1, knight d4, pawn g2 a3 h3.
Black: king h7, queen e6, rook g7, pawn e3 h4 a5 d5 f6 h6.
7 white and 9 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 36.
The position in numbers
Material is level — 20 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 h7.
It is Black to move on move 36, with 34 legal replies to weigh — only the line that keeps the advantage solves the puzzle.
White keeps 3 pawns, Black 6. Files fully open (no pawns of either colour): b, c — natural highways for the rooks and queen. Half-open for Black: g.
The Black king has 3 empty squares to step to right now — the fewer they are, the closer a mating net.
Solution & explanation
Main line
36... Qe4 37. Qf1 Qxd4 38. Qf5+ Kh8
Why it works
- Great move! queen to e4 keeps the pressure (+4.0).
- Well found: queen to d4 (+4.8).
- Strong! king to h8 is the sharp choice (+4.8).
- You win a piece — the knight.
- If instead Qf1, then Qxd4 and you win the knight.
Move by move
- 36… Qe4 — queen to e4
- 37. Qf1 — queen to f1
- Qxd4 — queen to d4 (capture)
- 38. Qf5+ — queen to f5 with check
- Kh8 — king to h8
Types in this puzzle
Queen fork
The queen lands on a square from which it attacks two targets at once.
The queen strikes along files, ranks and diagonals, so she forks more often than any other piece. Look for a square where the queen attacks two undefended targets at once — most often a check combined with a loose piece. Diagonal blows are especially venomous: a slanting check that also eyes a rook in the corner is the classic of the genre. Remember that both targets must be unprotected, or your «fork» is just a shot into the air.
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.
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 015
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