All Chess Tactics Explained: Part 1

Hello everyone. My name is Ryan I create educational content about chess. Hopefully my blogs can be a learning plateform for beginners, intermidiate or even advanced chess players. Now let's dig into today's blog! In this blog, I will show you the 5 chess tactics you have to know and explain them throughly with examples. Keep in mind I will create blogs about more tactics later on! Now let's get started!

You might have heard that chess is 90% tactics and 10% strategy. The reason why strategy and tactic are not the same is because stragegy are a long term plan (i.e. Creating an attack, etc) while tactics are a series to moves that can win material for your side, a positional advantage or even end the game! In this blog, I will show you all the main tactics and a puzzle in the end for you to solve.

#1: The Fork

The fork is one of the most common tactics yet many chess players (including myself) miss. A fork is when you attack 2 pieces at the same time. Often times, the side with a fork gain material since the other side can't protect both pieces at once. You can fork with any pieces on the board, like shown below.

Now that you have seen all types of forks, let us move on to pins.

#2: The Pin
The pin is a pwerful yet common tactic to win a piece. The pin happens when a piece can't move without losing a more valuable piece such as the queen, king, etc. There are 2 types of pins called the Relative Pin and the Absolute Pin. Now let's take a look at each of them.

Of course, there are many ways you can win a pinned piece. Take a look at this, for example.

Remember, you can only pin with queen, rook or bishop. There are many other pins that are much more complicated and brilliant at the same time.  I am planning to make a blog on that. So be sure to follow me and check it out

#3: Skewer
A skewer is an attack on 2 pieces that is lined up with one another. The difference in skewer and pin is the piece in front is always more valueable in skewers. Now let's look at an example.

Just like the pin, you can only skewer with a queen, bishop and rook.

#4: Discovered Attack

Discovered attack is when you attack 2 pieces at once. You uncover an extra attack by opening up the position using another piece. In the position below, both the knight and rook are under fire because both the bishop and the rook are attacking a separate piece. That is why you should always be on the lookout of board changes.

A discovered attack can also creates an discovered check, which looks something like this.

You might have heard of the quote "Even the laziest king flees wildly in a face of a double check." The discovered attack also consists double check, which is extremely dangerous since there are checks coming from multiple sides and you can't block any of them. The king can even be checkmated if not enough escape squares are on the board.

#5: Windmill

The Windmill tactic occurs when you let 1 of your pieces go beserk and take many pieces using forced discovered checks. Let us take a look.