The patterns
Chess tactics, one page each
82 patterns, 981 positions. Each page says what the tactic is and how it is spotted over the board, then shows it happening in real games, easiest first, with the answer one click away and a board to play the line out on.
Tactics
The ideas. What each one is, and how it is spotted.
- Fork
- Knight fork
- Royal fork
- Pawn fork
- Pin
- Absolute pin
- Relative pin
- Skewer
- Discovered attack
- Discovered check
- Double check
- Deflection
- Overloaded piece
- Remove the defender
- Attraction
- Clearance
- Interference
- Zwischenzug
- X-ray
- Sacrifice
- Greek gift
- Quiet move
- Zugzwang
- Hanging piece
- Trapped piece
- Defensive move
- Advanced pawn
- Promotion
- Underpromotion
- En passant
- Attacking f7 and f2
- Exposed king
- Kingside attack
- Queenside attack
- Castling
- Attack with check
- Windmill
Checkmate patterns
The mating nets that have names, because they turn up again and again.
Mate in one, two, three
The same exercise at four lengths, which is the honest measure of how far ahead you see.
Endgames
Fewer pieces, and every one of them decisive.
By phase
Where in a game the tactic came from.
By difficulty
Sets drawn from one rating band, for practice rather than reading.
The famous games
The patterns above, played by the people they are named after. The motif of the day archive has the Opera Game, the Evergreen, Rubinstein's Immortal and the rest, each with the position, the moves, and a board to play the combination out on.
These are everybody's positions. The rest of Motify is the ones that are yours: it reads your lichess and Chess.com games, finds the tactics you missed, and gives them back as puzzles. Try Motify on your own games.