Chess tactics for beginners: forks, pins, skewers and discovered attacks

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Most games between beginners and improving players are decided by tactics: a short sequence of moves that wins material or gives checkmate. You can know good opening principles and plans, but if you miss a fork, the game turns in a single move. The good news is that tactics follow a small number of recurring patterns, and you can learn to spot them with practice.

Forks

A fork is one piece attacking two or more enemy pieces at once. Your opponent can usually save only one.

Knight forks are the classic example. Because the knight moves in an L-shape, its attacks are easy to overlook. A knight check that also attacks the queen or a rook is especially strong, since the king must deal with the check first and the other piece is lost.
Pawn forks: a pawn advancing to attack two pieces diagonally at once.
Queen forks: the queen can attack in many directions, and a queen check that also hits an undefended piece is common.

Look out for undefended pieces, and for squares from which one of your pieces would attack two of them.

Pins

A pin is an attack on a piece that cannot move, or should not move, because a more valuable piece stands behind it on the same line.

Absolute pin: the piece behind is the king. The pinned piece is not allowed to move off the line, because that would expose the king to check.
Relative pin: the piece behind is valuable, like the queen or a rook. The pinned piece may legally move, but you would lose what is behind it.

Only pieces that move in straight lines (bishops, rooks and queens) can pin. Once a piece is pinned, attack it again, perhaps with a pawn: it cannot run away.

Skewers

A skewer is a pin in reverse: the more valuable piece is in front. When it moves out of the way, the piece behind it is captured. A rook or queen checking a king along a rank or file, with the enemy queen or rook behind it, is a typical skewer.

Discovered attacks

A discovered attack happens when you move one piece out of the way and reveal an attack by another piece behind it. Because the piece that moves can make its own threat at the same time, the opponent faces two problems at once. If the revealed attack is on the king, it is a discovered check, and the opponent must deal with the check first, often leaving the moving piece free to capture something. A double check is when both the moving piece and the revealed piece give check; the only defence is a king move.

Back-rank mates

A back-rank mate happens when a king sits behind its own unmoved pawns after castling, and a rook or queen lands on the back rank with check. The king cannot escape because its own pawns block it in. To avoid it, make a little space early on, an escape square, by moving one of the pawns in front of your king by one square when you have a quiet moment. And look for it in your opponent's position: a rook on an open file aimed at a weak back rank is often decisive.

Other patterns to learn next

Removing the defender: capture or chase away a piece that protects something, then take what it was protecting.
Overloading: one piece has two defensive jobs and cannot do both.
Deflection and decoy: force a piece away from a key square, or lure it onto a bad one.
Trapped pieces: a piece with no safe squares can sometimes be won outright.

Checks, captures and threats

Before every move, look at the forcing moves first, for both sides:

Checks: every check you could give.
Captures: every capture available.
Threats: moves that attack something.

Doing this every move, slowly at first, catches most tactics. It also stops you walking into your opponent's.

How to practise puzzles

Do a few puzzles every day. Regular practice builds pattern recognition far better than an occasional long session.
Solve before you move. Work out the whole line in your head, including the opponent's best reply, before touching a piece. Guessing teaches nothing.
Start easy. Puzzles that you mostly solve build patterns faster than ones you mostly fail.
Learn from misses. When you get one wrong, set it up on a board and play through the answer until you understand why it works.
Use themed sets. Practising forks or pins in a row trains the pattern itself; mixed sets then test whether you can spot it unannounced.

Which tactic catches you out most, or which one did you finally start spotting? Share it in the comments.