Pin: pawn to h7
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The tactical motive
Pin: a piece can't move without exposing something more valuable behind it.
Save the piece: one of your pieces is attacked — find the best way to rescue it.
Difficulty 2097 ShuffleRating — expert level — few solve it at first try.
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.
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 d1, queen f4, rook h1, bishop c4, knight c3, pawn g2 b3 f3 e4 h6.
Black: king g8, queen b6, rook b8, bishop e6 h8, pawn c6 d6 g6 e7 f7.
10 white and 10 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 26.
The position in numbers
Material is level — 25 points of pieces on each side (pawn = 1, knight and bishop = 3, rook = 5, queen = 9).
The white king stands on d1, the black king on g8.
It is White to move on move 26, 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): a — natural highways for the rooks and queen. Half-open for White: c, d.
Black hold the bishop pair, an edge in open lines. 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
26. h7+ Kf8 27. Bxe6 Qd4+ 28. Ke2
Why it works
- Great move! pawn to h7 keeps the pressure (+3.8).
- Well found: bishop to e6 (+4.0).
- Strong! king to e2 is the sharp choice (+4.0).
- You win a piece — the bishop.
- If instead Kf8, then Bxe6 and you win the bishop.
Move by move
- 26. h7+ — pawn to h7 with check
- Kf8 — king to f8
- 27. Bxe6 — bishop to e6 (capture)
- Qd4+ — queen to d4 with check
- 28. Ke2 — king to e2
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.
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 015
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