Discovered attack: pawn to f6
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The tactical motive
Discovered attack: one piece steps aside, unleashing another's attack.
Difficulty 1838 ShuffleRating — for advanced tacticians.
White to move — find the best continuation
How to recognize this tactic
A discovered attack fires when one piece steps aside and unmasks the piece behind it. Look for your own units that block a rook, bishop or queen: moving the front piece — ideally with a threat of its own — springs two attacks in one move.
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 h1, queen h5, rook a1 f1, bishop c1 e4, pawn a2 b2 c2 g2 h2 f4 e5.
Black: king h8, queen c5, rook a8 f8, bishop b7, knight d5 c6, pawn b4 f5 a6 e6 d7 h7.
13 white and 13 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 18.
The position in numbers
Black are ahead by 2 points of material (32 against 34; pawn = 1, knight and bishop = 3, rook = 5, queen = 9) — the tactic has to convert or outweigh that.
The white king stands on h1, the black king on h8.
It is White to move on move 18, with 35 legal replies to weigh — only the line that keeps the advantage solves the puzzle.
White keeps 7 pawns, Black 6. No file is fully open, so the heavy pieces have to be pried in. Half-open for White: d.
White hold the bishop pair, an edge in open lines. The White king has 0 empty squares to step to right now — the fewer they are, the closer a mating net.
Solution & explanation
Main line
18. exf6 Nxf6 19. Qxc5
Why it works
- Great move! pawn to f6 keeps the pressure (+3.7).
- Well found: queen to c5 (+3.8).
- You win a piece — the queen.
- If instead Nxf6, then Qxc5 and you win the queen.
Move by move
- 18. exf6 — pawn to f6 (capture)
- Nxf6 — knight to f6 (capture)
- 19. Qxc5 — queen to c5 (capture)
Types in this puzzle
Clearance
Clear your own piece out of the way — with tempo — for the decisive blow.
Clearance is about your own piece standing in the way of the decisive blow — so you move it aside, or even throw it away. The key is to clear with tempo: jump off with a check, a capture or a threat, giving the opponent no time to regroup. The telltale sign: you see a crushing queen or rook move, but one of your own pieces blocks the line or occupies the square. Do not cling to it — a clearance sacrifice usually costs less than a missed attack.
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.
Counter-strike
Don't defend — answer the threat with a bigger one.
The counter-strike: instead of defending against the threat, you answer with a bigger threat of your own. While your opponent grabs a pawn, you deliver mate — the arithmetic favors you. Look for a counter when direct defenses fail: do you have a check, an attack on the queen, a mating threat? The beginner's error is meeting every threat with a reflexive defense without checking the counterattacking resources first.
Provenance
Derived from the Lichess puzzle database (CC0).
Pack 013
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