Improve and Extend your Tactics:

The extension of tactics

This article is for those players who’ve started to get comfortable with basic tactical themes and want to know how to progress.

Puzzles like the above is what took my understanding of forks (and probably tactics as a whole) to the next level. The idea of sacrificing for position. A lot of players think of a sacrifice as something fantastical and winning if only they could see it. Usually in their mind it reveals a cunning trap that is sprung once the opponent takes the bait.

In my mind, a sacrifice is far more beautiful if the opponent has no choice but to take it.

These kinds of sacrifices, as well as being forcing, can often lead to positions from which tactics can arise. And that’s how you should be thinking.

Progression of tactical thoughts:

1. I can take that undefended piece.
2. I can fork material here.
3. (and now) If there was some way of distracting his queen over here, I would be able to do an excellent fork. Now how can I make that a reality?

Another excellent example of this is when you sacrifice the exchange and not necessarily a piece in order to have more opportunities

Your line of thinking might go something like this:
‘I have two attackers on e4, and she has only one defender. The trade of bishops is pretty forced anyway due to the positioning of the king and so I can win a pawn here and get into a good endgame.’

This is solid thinking. But once you see the opportunity for one tactical theme, it might be worth experimenting with other options.

In the same scenario, your line of thinking could be quite different.

‘Her king and queen are on the same diagonal. If I could only get rid of that bishop through deflection or sacrifice, I could have a devastating attack.’

So the crux of all this is: look for tactical potential not just tactics themselves, and see if you can realise that potential through sacrifice, deflection or exchange.

All the best with your chess

(I'm a writer and a coach on chess.com - feel free to message me if you'd like a free coaching game :)

Thanks for this helpful post. I loke how the first example combines a fork and a deflection.

For those wanting to learn the basic ideas of deflections, look at my blog post here: http://chesstrainerapp.blogspot.fr/2014/01/deflection.html

Thanks for your thoughts! I've actually used your app and it's pretty good. Sometimes limited, but the lessons included are really useful.