Chess tactics for beginners: forks, pins and double attacks

Tactics are short forced sequences that win material or deliver mate. Unlike strategy, they can be calculated exactly: either the device is there or it is not.

For a beginner this is the whole subject, and here is why. Up to a certain level games end not because somebody placed their pieces better but because somebody hung a queen. Studying opening subtleties while dropping a piece every ten moves is wasted time.

One piece attacks two or more at once. The opponent saves one, you take the other.

• Knight. The specialist: its L-shaped move is hard to see, and a fork on king and queen ends the game on the spot.
• Pawn. The most annoying one: a pawn attacks two pieces at once, and both are worth more than it is.
• Queen. Often attacks the king and an undefended piece at the far end of the board.
• Rook. Catches two pieces on the same rank or file.

How to spot them: look at your own pieces standing a knight's move apart on the same colour, and at any two pieces on one line. Check separately every square a knight could jump to with check.

A piece cannot move because something more valuable stands behind it. Only long-range pieces can do this: queen, rook and bishop.

A pinned piece effectively stops defending anything - that is the crucial consequence. The classic device follows: pin the defender, then attack what it was defending a second time.

If you are the one pinned: do not panic and do not start trading at random. Usually the answer is to move the king or queen off the line, bring another defender to the pinned piece, or trade off the piece doing the pinning.

Two related devices that beginners routinely confuse with each other and with the fork.

• Double attack. The broad term: any simultaneous threat in two places. A fork is a special case, but the threats can be of different kinds - attacking a piece plus threatening mate, for instance.
• Discovered attack. You move one piece away and open the line of another standing behind it. Two moves happen for the price of one.
• Discovered check. The same device where the line opened gives check. The moving piece can then do whatever it likes - nobody can take it, because the king must be saved.
• Double check. The strongest version: both pieces give check at once, and the only legal reply is a king move. No block and no capture helps.

Double check is worth remembering separately: it is the backbone of the prettiest mating combinations, the smothered mate among them.

Devices about making an enemy piece end up in the wrong place.

• Deflection. A piece is defending something - so you give it a more urgent job. The classic form is a queen check that forces the defender away, leaving the square undefended.
• Decoy. The reverse: you force a piece onto a specific square where a fork or a mate is waiting. Usually with a sacrifice that cannot be declined.
• Removing the defender. The blunt version: simply trade off the piece holding things together, even at the cost of the exchange.
• Overloading. One piece is defending two things at once - which means it is defending neither properly. Take the first, and the second falls.

What all four have in common: look at your opponent's defended pieces and ask exactly who is defending them. Tactics most often begin with the answer to that question.

A working habit before every move: check all checks, all captures and all attacks - yours first, then the replies available to your opponent. It takes about twenty seconds and saves a piece a game.

• Solve a little every day. Fifteen minutes daily beats two hours once a week: the pattern has to be recognised, not worked out.
• Solve in your head, without moving pieces. Otherwise you train shuffling rather than calculation.
• Go through your mistakes. A missed puzzle has to be understood, not scrolled past.
• Start with mating patterns. Ready-made mating shapes give the fastest early progress.
• Review your own games. After an event, go through them and find where the tactics actually were.

And above all - play. Tactics seen in a puzzle and tactics seen at the board with a clock running are two different skills, and only events train the second.