Win the hanging rook on d6
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The tactical motive
Hanging piece: your opponent left a piece undefended — take it.
Difficulty 2355 ShuffleRating — expert level — few solve it at first try.
Black to move — find the best continuation
How to recognize this tactic
A hanging piece is one that is attacked and not defended, or defended too few times. Count attackers against defenders on each enemy unit; where attackers win, take it — often with an in-between move or a check to gain the extra tempo.
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 f2, queen e4, rook d6, bishop e3 g6, knight c3 f3, pawn a2 b2 g2 h2.
Black: king f8, queen f6, rook d8 h8, bishop e6, knight c6, pawn h6 a7 b7 g7.
11 white and 10 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 18.
The position in numbers
White are ahead by 1 points of material (30 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 f2, the black king on f8.
It is Black to move on move 18, with 43 legal replies to weigh — only the line that keeps the advantage solves the puzzle.
White keeps 4 pawns, Black 4. Files fully open (no pawns of either colour): c, d, e, f — natural highways for the rooks and queen.
White hold the bishop pair, an edge in open lines. 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
18... Rxd6 19. Bc5 Bf7
Why it works
- Great move! rook to d6 keeps the pressure (+2.9).
- Well found: bishop to f7 (+2.8).
- You win a piece — the rook.
- If instead Bc5, then Bf7 and you win the rook.
Move by move
- 18… Rxd6 — rook to d6 (capture)
- 19. Bc5 — bishop to c5
- Bf7 — bishop to f7
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.
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 015
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