Chess tactics: the 10 motifs every player should know

Chess tactics are short, forcing blows —checks, captures, threats— that win material or deliver mate by exploiting a concrete weakness in your opponent's position. Almost all of them are built from a handful of recurring motifs: the fork, the pin, the skewer and the discovered attack, plus the tools that set them up, such as deflection, decoy and overloading. Recognising them at a glance is the fastest way to win more games at any level.

Tactics and strategy: the difference

Strategy decides what you want to do: attack on one wing, plant a knight on a strong square, trade pieces to reach a better endgame. Tactics are how a concrete move works out: the three- or four-move sequence in which your opponent's replies are forced and the outcome can be calculated.

A combination is a tactic that starts with a sacrifice: you give up material to force your opponent's hand and get back more than you gave. That is why tactics and chess piece values go together: what you count at the end of the sequence is material, or mate.

One idea worth keeping in mind from the start: tactics do not come out of nowhere. They appear when your opponent has loose pieces (undefended), an exposed king or pieces lined up on a rank, file or diagonal. If you learn to look for those three things on every move, most of the blows below will show up on their own.

The basic motifs

1. The fork or double attack

A single piece attacks two targets at once and your opponent can only save one. The knight is the specialist, because it attacks in every direction and cannot be blocked, but any piece can do it, even a pawn.

Here is a pawn fork that appears in the Four Knights version of the Italian Game:

Black gave up the knight on e4 and wins it straight back: the d5 pawn attacks both the bishop on c4 and the knight on e4, and one of the two white pieces is lost.

With the queen, the double attack is just as common. In the Exchange Variation of the Ruy Lopez, taking the e5 pawn looks like winning material and does not:

The queen hits the knight on e5 and the pawn on e4 at the same time. White saves the knight and Black regains the pawn.

2. The pin

An attacked piece cannot move because something more valuable stands behind it. If the piece behind is the king, the pin is absolute and moving the pinned piece is illegal; if it is any other piece, the pin is relative: the piece can move, but it costs dearly.

This is the Nimzo-Indian: the bishop on b4 pins the knight on c3 to the king on e1. The knight cannot go anywhere while the pin lasts, and the whole opening revolves around that fact.

The difference between the two kinds of pin decides games. In the Elephant Trap of the Queen's Gambit, White believes the knight on f6 is pinned, and it is not:

The black knight on f6 was pinned to the queen, not the king, so it was free to move. Black gave up the queen, won White's queen back with the check on b4 and came out a piece up.

3. The skewer

It is a pin in reverse: the front piece is the more valuable one, it has to step aside and the piece behind it falls. With the king in front it is crushing, because your opponent has no choice.

Re1+ forces the king off the e-file, and the rook collects the queen. Both sides have far less material than in a normal game, but the pattern is exactly the same with a full board.

4. The discovered attack

One piece moves and uncovers the line of another of your pieces, which now attacks something that was hidden. It is like playing two moves in one: the piece that moves threatens something on its own and the piece behind threatens something else. If the uncovered line gives check, it is a discovered check, and if both pieces give check, a double check, the strongest of all, because the only answer is to move the king.

The Petroff Defence has an example that catches thousands of players in fast games:

The knight leaves e5 and opens the e-file: the white queen checks the black king, while the knight on c6 attacks the queen on d8. Black has to deal with the check and loses the queen.

The tools that set up the blow

Often the fork or the pin is not on the board yet. The motifs below are there to create them: they force an enemy piece to go where it does not want to, or to stop doing its job.

5. Deflection

You force a defending piece to leave the square or line it protects, usually with a sacrifice or a threat it cannot ignore. Whenever a single piece is the only thing holding something important together —the back rank, another piece, a mating square— ask yourself what happens if it is forced to move.

6. Decoy

The opposite idea: you force an enemy piece, often the king, to go to a bad square, where it then walks into a fork, a skewer or mate. The most famous example is the smothered mate:

Nf7+ Kg8 Nh6+ Kh8 Qg8+ Rxg8 Nf7#. The queen sacrifice on g8 decoys the black rook onto that square, and the king is boxed in by its own pieces. Notice Nh6+ as well: it is a double check, from the knight and the queen at once, so the king has no option but to go back to h8.

7. Overloading

A piece has two defensive jobs and cannot do both. You attack one of them and the other is left unguarded. The question to ask is: what does each enemy piece defend? If the same piece shows up twice in the answer, there is an overload to exploit.

8. Removing the defender

You trade off or capture the piece that defends something valuable, even if it costs material. The textbook case is exchanging the knight on f6 that guards h7 so that the queen and bishop can mate on that square.

The blows that decide games

9. The back-rank mate

A castled king behind its three pawns, with no escape square, is at the mercy of a rook or queen that reaches the first or eighth rank. It decides more club games than any other tactic, and it often combines several of the motifs above:

Qxc8 Qxc8 Rxc8#. The queen on d8 is the piece guarding the eighth rank: if it recaptures, the king is left alone and the rook mates; if it does not, White is simply a rook up. The preventive defence is simple and lasts a lifetime: as soon as you can, give your king some air with h3 or g3 (h6 or g6 with Black).

10. The in-between move

When your opponent captures and the recapture looks compulsory, before recapturing check whether there is something stronger: a check, a mating threat or an attack on a more valuable piece. That in-between move, often called by its German name zwischenzug, changes the order of events and often the outcome of the whole sequence. It is the motif most often forgotten in calculation, because the recapture feels automatic.

Two more motifs you will find in books: the X-ray, where a piece acts through another piece standing on the same line, and interference, where you place a piece between two enemy pieces to cut their connection.

How to find tactics in your games

Knowing the names is not enough: the hard part is seeing them at the board. A short routine before every move:

1. Look at checks, captures and threats, first yours and then your opponent's. It is the most useful rule in all of tactics.
2. Look for loose pieces. An undefended piece is the natural target of a fork or a double attack.
3. Look for pieces lined up. King and queen on the same diagonal, two rooks on the same rank: that is where pins and skewers live.
4. Ask what each enemy piece defends. If one of them is doing too much, there is a deflection or an overload.
5. Calculate to the end. A tactic that "almost" works is a piece given away. If that is hard for you, the guide on how to think in the middlegame puts the process in order.

How to train tactics

• Puzzles every day, grouped by theme. Ten or twenty minutes a day pay off more than two hours at the weekend. Start with single themes —only forks, only pins— until the pattern appears without thinking, then mix them. Do chess puzzles actually help? explains when they really help and when they become a pastime.
• Calculate before you move the piece. In a puzzle, decide the whole sequence and only then play it. Guessing the first move trains intuition, not calculation.
• Review your games. The tactics you missed, for and against, are the best study material you have; the method is in how to analyse your own chess games.
• Study the combinations of the masters. Seeing the motifs in real games teaches you when they appear and which positions prepare them. Mikhail Tal is the classic example, and the course Tactical masters: from Morphy to Shirov goes through the ideas of six great attacking players in chess history.

Once you see the simple motifs, the next step is understanding when it is worth giving up material without a forced blow behind it. That is what The Art of Sacrifice: Pawns, Pieces, and the Exchange is for: it works on when compensation justifies the sacrifice.