"Chess is 99% tactics." – Richard Teichmann

"Strategy requires thought, tactics require observation." – Max Euwe

The Fundamentals course covers the basics of winning and saving material. This course goes further: here you learn to win pieces by force, through sequences where your opponent has no safe reply.

About Tactics

Sometimes your opponent makes a simple mistake and leaves a piece hanging. They move it to a square where it can be captured, or forget to defend it. You just take it.

Against stronger opponents, those free pieces become rare. To win material, you need tactics: forced sequences that lead to a winning result no matter how your opponent responds. Your opponent does not need to cooperate. The threats are simply too much to handle.

What you will learn

The following tactical ideas are included:

Forks

A fork is a move with one piece that attacks two or more targets at the same time. You win material because your opponent cannot deal with every threat in a single move.

Pins and skewers

Pins and skewers attack a piece with another valuable piece behind it. If the front piece moves, the piece behind it is lost.

Discovered attacks and checks

In a discovered attack, one piece moves away and reveals an attack by another piece. As with forks, your opponent is suddenly facing more than one problem at once.

Removing the defence

Your opponent seems to have everything protected — until you remove a key defender and the position falls apart.

Intermediate moves and checks

Sometimes your opponent appears to have stopped your idea. But one in-between move can change the whole position and bring the tactic back to life.

Trapping pieces

Not every tactic wins material immediately. Sometimes you attack a piece and leave it with nowhere safe to go.

These tactical ideas decide games at every level, including at the top. Even positional players need them: tactics are how you convert an advantage into a win, or save a position that is starting to go wrong.

Examples

White has just played the unfortunate blunder Ng1-e2?, and Black can strike immediately with the knight fork 1...Ne5, attacking the queen on f3 and the unprotected bishop on c4.

One piece attacks two targets, and your opponent cannot save both. Here the fork is especially strong because White’s own knight on e2 blocks the queen’s retreat. White cannot move the queen and protect the bishop at the same time.

After this course, you will spot these opportunities much faster, especially when loose pieces and strong knight jumps are sitting right there on the board.

The queen on c6 is doing too much at once: it protects both the bishop on g2 and the rook on c5. That makes it overloaded, and Black can exploit this with the deflection 1...Rxg2!, temporarily sacrificing the exchange.

After 2.Qxg2, the queen is pulled away from its defence of the rook on c5. Black follows up with 2...Qxc5 and emerges with a winning material advantage.

One forcing move drags a defender away, and the whole position changes. Learning to spot when a defending piece is stretched too thin is one of the most useful tactical skills there is.

White wins with the beautiful move 1.Nc6!!, threatening a fork on e7.

The point is deeper than it looks at first. The knight on c6 also interferes with the rook’s defence of the knight on c5, so White is threatening to capture that knight as well. And if Black accepts the sacrifice with 1...Rxc6, White has the back-rank checkmate 2.Rd8#.

Black cannot defend against all of White’s threats. The winning idea is still a tactical motif, but now you also need to see why the defence fails. That is what the later levels in this course are about.

Intended audience

You should have mastered Fundamentals before starting Tactics. The Puzzle Academy skill tree takes care of that, so if you are reading this guide, you are ready to begin.

The first Tactics levels have an average rating of roughly 1200 to 1500, while the higher levels reach around 1800. If you want to score very highly on the advanced levels, Tactics remains useful practice well beyond that, even up to national master strength.

Next courses

Once you are comfortable with these themes, the Combinations course teaches you to chain several tactical motifs together. The Defence course covers the other side: defending against your opponent's threats, and avoiding moves that walk into tactics.