Tactics: A Beginner's Guide Part 2
Hey and welcome back! This is part 2 of the beginner's guide to chess tactics, an essential component of chess. If you haven't already, be sure to check out part 1 here.
A quick recap of Part 1: We covered 5 of the most crucial tactical themes for beginners: pins, forks, skewers, weak bank ranks, and hanging pieces.
In Part 2, I'll be building on these themes, covering the following 4 themes that I believe are important for beginners to know:
1. Remove the Defender
2. Discovered Attacks
3. Double-Check
4. Smothered Mate
Remove the Defender
Remove the defender is a tactical theme in which you try to get rid of a piece defending another one in order to then capture the undefended piece. Take a look at this position:
Here, after black's dark-squared bishop captures the white knight and white recaptures, the black knight is free to capture white's light-squared bishop.
Discovered Attacks
Discovered Attacks occur when, as a result of moving 1 piece, another piece now directly attacks something.
Double-Check
Double Check is exactly what you may think when reading the name; a situation where moving a piece allows you to give a check twice.
In this position, moving the knight to h6 results in not only a check from the knight but also a check from the queen. As a result, the king is forced to move, as there is no way to capture both pieces or block both checks in just one move.
Smothered Mate
Smothered Mate occurs when a piece (in almost all cases a knight) delivers checkmate because the opponent's pieces are trapping their own king. Looking at the same position from above:
It's possible to deliver a smothered mate after this double-check through a forcing move. By playing Qg8+, Black's only option is to take with the rook, at which point the king is completely trapped after Nf7, resulting in checkmate.
These should be the majority of the tactical themes that will help you succeed both as a beginner and even as an intermediate player to a certain extent.
I hope this helped. If you've made it this far, feel free to leave any suggestions below in terms of how I should structure my blog posts and/or what topics I should write about. Thank you!
