Discovered attack: bishop to d5 (b7)
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The tactical motive
Discovered attack: one piece steps aside, unleashing another's attack.
Save the piece: one of your pieces is attacked — find the best way to rescue it.
Difficulty 2195 ShuffleRating — expert level — few solve it at first try.
Black 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.
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 g2, rook d1 a7, bishop d5, knight e6, pawn b2 h2 f5.
Black: king h6, rook b6 e7, bishop b7, knight f7, pawn b4 d6.
8 white and 7 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 50.
The position in numbers
White are ahead by 1 points of material (19 against 18; pawn = 1, knight and bishop = 3, rook = 5, queen = 9) — the tactic has to convert or outweigh that.
The white king stands on g2, the black king on h6.
It is Black to move on move 50, with 19 legal replies to weigh — only the line that keeps the advantage solves the puzzle.
White keeps 3 pawns, Black 2. Files fully open (no pawns of either colour): a, c, e, g — natural highways for the rooks and queen. Half-open for Black: f, h.
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
50... Bxd5+ 51. Rxd5 Rxa7 52. Rd4 Kh7
Why it works
- Brilliant! The bishop on d5 is a sacrifice that works — you stand better (+2.3).
- Well found: rook to a7 (+2.7).
- Strong! king to h7 is the sharp choice (+2.5).
- You win a piece — the rook.
- If instead Rxd5, then Rxa7 and you win the rook.
Move by move
- 50… Bxd5+ — bishop to d5 (capture) with check
- 51. Rxd5 — rook to d5 (capture)
- Rxa7 — rook to a7 (capture)
- 52. Rd4 — rook to d4
- Kh7 — king to h7
Types in this puzzle
Win the pinned piece
The pinned piece cannot run — attack it again and win it.
A pinned piece cannot flee, which means you can win it outright by attacking it one more time. Count attackers against defenders: if you outnumber them, the piece is yours. The best extra attacker is a pawn, since it costs less than anything it might capture. Do not rush the capture — build up the pressure first, then harvest.
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.
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 015
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