Test your Chess: Tactics And The Principled Line

We are going to have a lesson tactics/calculation today. Being able to accurately and efficiently calculate is vitally important in your chess performance - thus we should work on organizing our thoughts.

First, try to solve the tactic below:

White to Move

Were you able to solve it? If not, let's try again but this time with some guided thinking.

Answer the question: What is the principled line?

In this case, What is the move we would like to make that would immediately give us a decisive advantage?
After you determine this, focus your efforts on this line and try to make it work.


** Try again, then scroll down for answer **

The principled line is Qxe5 which would be winning as we would be up a full piece. Once we determine this, we should focus our efforts on making this work - this incidentally should be the first line we calculate. We must calculate this one before we begin calculating other lines. I suspect that many of the readers spent much time on other lines besides Qxe5. The lesson here is that we can only look at the other lines after we have refuted the principled line! The answer is given below: