Pitfalls: Defend & threaten
In this lesson you have to be extra careful to choose the right move. In the puzzles, you are either about to lose a piece or your king is checked. So you need to play a defensive move.
But there's more to it than that. You have to combine defending and threatening. Sometimes you already have a nice threat on the board and you have to be careful that your defensive move doesn't destroy that threat. In other puzzles you need to defend with a move that also poses a threat, because otherwise you will lose material.
Take a look at the examples to see how it works.
Don't play too fast and think carefully before your move. The puzzles are tricky. Don't fall into the pitfall.
What do you have to do?
Defend a piece and maintain or create a threat.
The white knight is hanging (it is attacked and it is not defended by another piece).
White has to do something about that.
Luckily black also has an hanging knight, so a counterattack is a nice defense.
White can capture the black knight with the pawn or the rook.
If White takes the knight with his rook, the black rook then captures the white knight.
This is an equal exchange.
But White is a piece behind and wants to take points.
If White captures the knight with his pawn, he succeeds.
Black has no time to capture the white knight, because his rook is attacked by the white rook.
Can't Black just capture that rook with his own rook?
No, because then the white knight takes that rook.
