Well, for starters it's concrete. Your queen and knight are under attack but your knight is poised to capture the rook on h8. d6 *check* protects the knight with tempo which then will allow you to extricate your queen with a tempo gaining check as well, after which you can capture the rook. There might be a mate too but I'm not seeing one immediately.
Why is ♙d6+ the Best move here?
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PopcornSC wrote:
Well, for starters it's concrete. Your queen and knight are under attack but your knight is poised to capture the rook on h8. d6 *check* protects the knight with tempo which then will allow you to extricate your queen with a tempo gaining check as well, after which you can capture the rook. There might be a mate too but I'm not seeing one immediately.
Yes, this makes sense. But difficult to see.
When I saw this puzzle I immediately thought of ♙d6+, but then I remembered that I have a bad habit of pushing meaningless checks -- it's something a lot of scrubs at my level do. I then realized that the pawn check doesn't really accomplish anything so I thought of some other moves and decided that either moving my queen out of the way of pawn attack or even ♘xd8 would be better. But lo and behold the best move was indeed ♙d6+. But why?
I'm guessing that moving the d6 pawn allows the bishop to protect the knight on f7? Still confused about what differentiates meaningless checks from a move like this one.