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Tap a piece, then tap where it should go. Find the strongest move!
Most games below master level are not decided by deep opening preparation or subtle endgame technique. They are decided by a single tactic that one player saw and the other did not. A hanging knight, a loose back rank, a queen and king lined up on the same diagonal — these moments appear in almost every game, and the player who spots them wins material or the game outright.
That is exactly what puzzle training builds. Every position on this page is taken from a real game between real players, at the precise moment where a winning tactic existed. You are not memorising theory; you are training the pattern recognition that lets you see these moments at the board, under a clock, without being told that something is there.
Nearly every puzzle you solve here is one of a small number of recurring shapes. Learn to recognise them and the puzzles stop feeling like riddles and start feeling like reading.
One piece attacks two or more enemy pieces at once. The opponent can only save one. Knights are the classic forking piece because their move cannot be blocked, but pawns, queens and even kings fork too.
A piece cannot move because doing so would expose a more valuable piece behind it. In an absolute pin the piece behind is the king, so the pinned piece is frozen by the rules themselves.
The reverse of a pin: the valuable piece is in front and must move, leaving the piece behind it to be captured. Bishops, rooks and queens deliver skewers along lines and diagonals.
Moving one piece uncovers an attack from a piece behind it. Because the moving piece can create a second threat of its own, discovered attacks often win material outright.
Two pieces give check at the same time. Blocking and capturing are both useless — the king must move. This is why double check is so often the final blow in a mating attack.
A defending piece is forced away from the square it was guarding, or lured onto a square where it can be attacked. The defence collapses even though nothing was captured yet.
Capture or chase away the piece that was holding the position together. The target it was protecting then falls on the following move.
A king trapped behind its own unmoved pawns has no escape square. A rook or queen arriving on the back rank ends the game immediately. Countless games are lost to this alone.
Each of these is covered in depth, with diagrams, in our guide to pins, forks and skewers.
The category filters above the board let you train pure checkmating vision instead of general tactics.
One move ends the game. These look trivial once you see them, and that is the point: the goal is to reach the stage where you see them instantly rather than calculating. Start here if checkmate patterns are still slow for you.
You play a move, the opponent gets a reply, and your second move mates. The difficulty jumps because your first move has to work against every legal defence, not just the one you expected. Most mate-in-2 solutions begin with a quiet move or a sacrifice that removes the king's escape squares.
Three of your moves, two of the opponent's. This is where real calculation begins — you must hold several branches in your head at once. Solving these regularly is the single best exercise for calculation depth.
If forced mate patterns are new to you, work through our beginner checkmate patterns first, then come back and drill them here.
There is a method, and using it is the difference between training and guessing. Guessing until the board turns green teaches you nothing.
When you are stuck, the Hint button shows which piece to move without giving away the destination — enough to unstick you while leaving the real work to you.
Every puzzle carries its own rating, calculated from how often real players solve it. Easy puzzles sit around 700 to 1100 and usually involve a single obvious tactic. Medium runs to 1500, where the winning move is often a quiet one or a sacrifice. Hard reaches 1800 and beyond, where the solution frequently begins with a move that looks like a blunder.
Train slightly above your comfort level, not far above it. If you are solving nearly everything instantly, move up. If you are failing most attempts, drop back down — puzzles you cannot solve teach far less than puzzles you can solve with effort. For a taste of the extreme end, see our collection of the hardest chess puzzles ever composed.
Yes. Every puzzle is free and unlimited, with no account and no sign-up. The puzzles come from the Lichess open database, released under CC0.
Millions, drawn from real games. The Next button serves a new position every time, filtered by the difficulty and category you have selected.
Ten to twenty solved carefully beats a hundred rushed. Quality of calculation matters far more than volume — a puzzle you truly worked out is worth ten you clicked through.
For most players below 1800, yes, and faster than any other form of study. The majority of games at that level are decided by a missed or allowed tactic, so improving tactical vision directly converts into results.
Yes. ChessDada runs free live chess with Elo-rated rooms and no download required. Tactics you practise here are the same ones that decide your games in the lobby.