As I have mentioned in the lesson about taking free pieces almost all chess games are won by first obtaining a material advantage.
I have added some capture exercises to this site. They are intended for the beginning chess player, but it is assumed that this chess player knows how the pieces move and also knows about the value of these pieces.
The exercises can be seen as a follow-up on this last one and the lesson about taking free pieces.
When looking at the chess position of the next diagram you may notice that White’s bishop at g2 is able to pin Black’s bishop at e6, but this can’t be called a real pin.
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If White plays Bd5 then Black can just capture the bishop. In this specific case 33.Bd5 will probably be followed by 33…Nh3+ 34.Nxh3 Bxd5. But detecting this kind of alignment of pieces is still very important. Most of the time pieces are attacked and defended in order to create a kind of balance. This often enables us to replace a piece of the opponent with another piece. In the position of the diagram White is able to play 33.Nxe6. After 33…Nxe6 Black’s bishop is replace by a knight and now White is able to pin this knight by 34.Bd5. At first sight it may even seem that Black is able to defend this knight by playing 34…Kf7, but this will meet 35.Rce1.
Another example of such a replacement can be found in the next diagram.
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In some of the previous lessons we have learned about the pin and how we could make use of a pin in order to win a piece. All these lessons started with a position in which two enemy pieces were aligned with each other. In order to create an absolute pin the opponent’s king has to be placed on the same line, file or diagonal as one of his other pieces.
The next step is to learn how to force this alignment.
Before I am going to write a lesson about this positioning of the opponent’s pieces I refer you to another site with some very interesting chess lessons, because it contains a lesson about Pushing the Enemy King into Line. The purpose of this lessons seems to be identical:
Our next task is to learn how to create that alignment when it doesn’t already exist. The principal tools we will use here are checks that push the king into a line with one of its fellow pieces, or that require an enemy piece to jump into line with its king to protect it. Or sometimes a capture may require a king to recapture and cause it to walk into a pin.
Before we start with a new lesson about the pin we are going to repeat the four things that we have learned about the pin in our previous lessons:
1. Remember the difference between an absolute and a relative pin.
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Black is not allowed to move the knight on c6.
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Black is allowed to move the knight, but then (in this case) White will capture the queen.
See also the lesson about the pin.
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