Every Day Chess › Tactics
Chess Tactics Explained
Tactics are the short, forcing sequences that win material or deliver checkmate. Every game is decided by them, at every level. These six patterns account for the vast majority of tactical opportunities in club chess — learn them, and you will start seeing them before your opponent does.
Fork
One piece attacks two enemy pieces simultaneously. Your opponent can save only one. The knight fork is the most common version, but pawns, queens, and bishops fork too.
648 practice puzzles →Pin
A piece cannot move without exposing something more valuable behind it. Absolute pins against the king are illegal to break; relative pins are just very expensive to break.
264 practice puzzles →Skewer
The reverse of a pin: you attack a high-value piece directly, forcing it to move and leaving a less valuable piece exposed behind it.
107 practice puzzles →Discovered attack
You move one piece and reveal an attack from a piece that was sitting behind it. Two threats land at once — your opponent can only answer one.
237 practice puzzles →Back rank mate
A castled king trapped by its own pawns is checkmated by a rook or queen on the back rank. One of the most common checkmates in club chess at every level.
124 practice puzzles →Deflection
Force a defending piece away from the square it is guarding. The piece that was being defended falls, or checkmate follows.
160 practice puzzles →How to learn chess tactics
Pattern recognition is the foundation. Every tactic you see in a game is a variation on a pattern you have either seen or missed before. The players who spot tactics quickly are not calculating faster — they are matching the position to a pattern they have already stored. There is only one way to build that library: repetition on real game positions.
Studying these patterns is a starting point. The gap closes fastest when you practice them in the kind of positions that actually appear in games — not artificial textbook examples but real moves from real games, at your rating level, under mild time pressure. That is what the daily ten gives you: ten positions a day, scored by theme, with your misses coming back until they stick.
Practice all six patterns in today's live puzzles — free.
Ten daily chess puzzles at your level. Skill tracked by theme. Misses come back as Rematches. No account, no card.
Play today's ten →