Remove the defender
Take the piece that guards your target, and the target is left without protection.
The idea
Take the piece that guards your target, and the target falls.
- The black queen is the only defender of the bishop.
- White takes that queen, and Black takes back with a pawn.
- Now nothing defends the bishop, and the rook takes it.
In a game: When a piece has only one defender, look for a way to take that defender.
How the lesson begins
A piece that is defended is hard to win. But the defender can be captured. If you take it in a way the other side has to answer, the piece it was guarding is left without protection.
Here Black’s queen attacks White’s queen, and the black bishop on f4 is defended only by that queen. White’s rook on f1 is hidden behind its own queen. Watch what White does.
- 23. Qxe4 fxe4 24. Rxf4
Find the move
White to move. The pawn on e5 is attacked by your knight and your rook, and defended by the knight on c6 and the rook on e8. Find the move that wins the pawn.
A hint
Take one of the pieces that guards the pawn.
Show the answer
1. Bxc6
Bxc6 takes the knight, one of the pawn’s two defenders. After bxc6 the pawn is attacked twice and defended once, so White wins it. Taking at once fails: after Nxe5 Rxe5 Rxe5 Nxe5 White has lost a knight and a rook for a rook and a pawn, so it is a knight down for a pawn.
In numbers
In the puzzle bank
666 puzzles in GreyChess’s bank practise it. Half of them are rated between 1,226 and 2,303.
The piece that makes the first move of the answer: rook 29%, queen 27%, knight 20%, bishop 17%, pawn 5%, in puzzles from the Lichess puzzle database.