Rescue the knight to d4
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The tactical motive
Save the piece: one of your pieces is attacked — find the best way to rescue it.
Difficulty 2318 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 e6, rook a1 f1, bishop c1, knight e4, pawn a2 b2 c2 f2 h2 g3.
Black: king g7, queen h5, rook a8 f8, bishop d6, knight c6, pawn g6 a7 b7 c7.
12 white and 10 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 17.
The position in numbers
White are ahead by 2 points of material (31 against 29; pawn = 1, knight and bishop = 3, rook = 5, queen = 9) — the tactic has to convert or outweigh that.
The white king stands on g1, the black king on g7.
It is Black to move on move 17, with 54 legal replies to weigh — only the line that keeps the advantage solves the puzzle.
White keeps 6 pawns, Black 4. Files fully open (no pawns of either colour): d, e — 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
17... Nd4 18. Qd7+ Rf7 19. Qxf7+ Kxf7
Why it works
- Great move! knight to d4 keeps the pressure (+4.4).
- Well found: rook to f7 (+4.6).
- Strong! king to f7 is the sharp choice (+4.5).
- You win a piece — the queen.
- If instead Qd7+, then Rf7 and you stay on top.
Move by move
- 17… Nd4 — knight to d4
- 18. Qd7+ — queen to d7 with check
- Rf7 — rook to f7
- 19. Qxf7+ — queen to f7 (capture) with check
- Kxf7 — king to f7 (capture)
Types in this puzzle
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?
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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