What is a pin?
A pin happens when a piece cannot move because doing so would expose something more valuable behind it. If the piece behind is the king, the pin is absolute and the piece legally cannot move at all. If it is a queen or a rook, the pin is relative — the piece can move, but at a price. Bishops, rooks and queens are the only pieces that pin, because a pin needs a line.
How to spot it
- Scan the long diagonals and the open files for an enemy piece sitting between your line piece and their king or queen.
- Once a piece is pinned, stop treating it as a defender — it cannot capture anything without losing the piece behind it.
- Add attackers to a pinned piece rather than taking immediately. A pinned knight attacked twice is usually just lost.
The mistake to avoid
Trusting a pinned piece to defend a square. In a relative pin your opponent may happily break the pin if the material works out for them.
Train the ones you actually miss
Solving a motif in isolation is useful, but the tactics that cost you rating are the ones you walked past in your own games. Run a free game review and Chesslume turns your own mistakes into puzzles, so you train the pattern you personally keep missing rather than a random one.
Other tactical motifs
- Fork puzzles — One piece, two targets, and your opponent can only save one.
- Skewer puzzles — A pin backwards: the big piece is in front, and it has to move.
- Discovered attack puzzles — The piece that moves is not the piece that does the damage.
- Hanging piece puzzles — The most common way games are decided is the simplest one.
- Deflection puzzles — The defender is doing a job. Give it a better offer.
- Back-rank mate puzzles — The pawns that shelter the king are also the walls of its cell.
- Mate in 2 puzzles — Two moves, no escape, every defence covered.