Learn to set up multiple move combinations

Calculate like a chess master, move by move

Since chess is 99% tactics, this is the must-have of Chessly courses. The Tactics Masterclass takes you on a journey of chess patterns—from the building blocks of chess tactics to what some would call complex combinations.

In the first chapter of the Tactics Masterclass course, we’ll learn about what’s probably the most common tactic in chess: the fork!

Forks and double attacks are strong weapons that sometimes arise unexpectedly. Our aim will be to set them up or spot them when they pop up to win games right away!

Going through multiple games of chess I played, I will explain step by step how forks or double attacks are created, which pieces are more likely to fork than others, and how powerful the concept of forks really is in chess!

Introduction to Forks

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Study 1: Forks 101 - Winning Material

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Study 2: A Knight Fork - Setup and Execution

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Study 3: Trade into Double Attack

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Study 4: A Fork Made Possible By A Pin

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Chapter 1: Forks and Double Attacks

After this chapter, I hope you get a better understanding of how you can win material with forks, how you can look to set them up, how some trades can enable you to achieve a fork, and how you can combine forks with other tactics!

All in all, you should be able to develop a skill to spot forks quicker.

Learning about pins is crucial in chess, as they can pop up in all stages of the game.

In this chapter, we’ll learn about relative and absolute pins, the difference between them and how you can exploit them.

Finally, in the last study, we’ll take a look at a game full of pins to give you a visual experience of how common they are in real life games.

Introduction to Pins

Study 1: The Relative and Absolute Pin

Study 2: Exploiting Absolute and Relative Pins

Study 3: Applying Pressure on an Absolute Pin

Study 4: Back and Forth Pins

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Chapter 2: The Absolute and Relative Pins

Remember: put pressure on the pinned piece! When learning about pins, this is the sentence you should keep in mind at all times. Pinned pieces usually cannot or must not move, which makes them the perfect targets.

Also, always be aware that pinned pieces don’t actually protect other pieces if they’re pinned! This can help you organize attacks quicker and better.

Discovered attacks, checks and double checks are more powerful tactics in chess that can be great weapons for your repertoire, and Chapter 3 will deal with those.

Fun fact: A double check is a type of check in which the only way out is to move the king! Blocking or capturing the attacker is impossible because there are two attackers!

Introduction to Discovered Attacks

Study 1: The Discovered Check

Study 2: Mixing Discovered Attacks and Checks

Study 3: Discovered Checkmate

Study 4: The Windmill 

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Chapter 3: Discovered Attacks, Discovered Checks and Double Checks

Having gone through the different types and variants of discovered checks and attacks, as well as double checks, I hope that you have a better understanding of this tactic.

You should now be more open to sacrifice material temporarily if it means getting a double check-checkmate or a windmill!

In this chapter, we’ll go through 3 games in 3 different studies played by top grandmasters around the world, explaining how deflection and attraction tactics work.

Sometimes, you will need to deflect or attract a piece to a square you want it on for multiple different reasons. Those reasons could be another tactic, like a fork, as you’ll see in Study 1, or a check, for example.

Finally, Study 3 will showcase an amazing game played by a former Polish champion which includes a mix of different distraction tactics.

Introduction to Decoys

Study 1: Attraction

Study 2: Amazing Tal Deflections

Study 3: A Masterpiece of Distractions

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Chapter 4: Decoy/Deflection/Attraction

As we’ve seen in this chapter, in the studies as well as the exercises, deflection and attraction tactics can be the real game changer in chess.

They simply force a piece on a certain square you want it to be on, which is crucial when calculating an attacking sequence, for example.

As you’ve learned, these types of tactics are often combined with sacrifices.

Sometimes, during an attack, there will be only one piece or pawn that’s preventing you from checkmating your opponent or achieving a successful attack. In those cases, removing that defender at any cost is the way to go.

In this chapter, we’ll learn to recognize positions in which you can remove a defender, sometimes with a sacrifice and sometimes not, and the best ways to remove a defender in chess.

Introduction to Removing the Defender

Study 1: Removing the Defender

Study 2: An Overloaded Piece

Study 3: Kramnik Removes The Defenders

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Chapter 5: Remove the Defender: Capture or Overload

When you see a single defender restraining you from achieving your goals, remove it at all costs! 
You can combine tactics like deflections we learned in chapter 4, sacrifices like you will learn in chapter 11, and many other different tactics to remove a defender. Among other things, that’s the beauty of this chapter.

Chapter 6 will deal with another type of tactic similar to a pin, which are skewers and x-rays. A pin is when the piece of higher value is behind a piece of lower value.

A skewer is the other way around! You’ll attack the piece of higher value first, forcing it to move, and then often capture the piece of lower value.

Luckily, these tactics work similar to pins, so you’ll be able to use your knowledge of pins in this chapter to help you out.

Introduction to Skewers and X-Rays

Study 1: The Skewer

Study 2: The X-Ray

Study 3: A Skewer to Remove the Defender

Chapter 6: Skewers and X-Rays

Knowledge of different tactics is crucial not because of the broad possibilities in the tactical world, but also because of understanding how different tactics work together flexibly to improve your positions in unexpected ways. 

I hope this chapter has brought that a little bit closer to you, and you will learn more about it in Chapter 13.

Welcome to the chapter on trapping pieces.

There are common positions in chess where a piece can get trapped by capturing a poisoned pawn, or wandering into enemy territory and running out of squares to escape to.

In this chapter, we’ll learn to locate these types of positions and how to organize our pieces in such ways that trap the opponent’s ones.

We’ll even look at a game played in the World Chess championship that includes the trapping of a piece.

Introduction to Trapped Pieces 

Study 1: Alekhine Traps A Queen

Study 2: Holding A Rook Hostage

Study 3: Ian Nepomniachtchi vs Magnus Carlsen, 2021 

Chapter 7: Trapping Pieces

The feeling of trapping someone’s queen for the first time is fantastic, and I’m sure you’ll feel it pretty soon having worked through this chapter.

After all, it can’t get much better than learning from real life World Championship games.

Checkmate is the ultimate goal in the game of chess we all strive to achieve. In chapter 8, we’ll take a look at how motifs like open files, mating nets and sacrifices combine and help us achieve checkmating attacks, and which openings and positions are more suitable for these types of attacks and tactics.

Study 1: H-File Attacks

Study 2: Surrounding The Enemy King

Study 3: Sacrificing Material for an Attack

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Chapter 8: Checkmate Tactics

Activity is more important than material advantage. A true statement in most cases, and definitely a true one concerning this chapter. I hope you’ll learn to recognize how open files and diagonals, as well as sacrifices can help you become a checkmating machine!

In chess, you’ll often find yourself in an unfavorable or a losing position at some point in the game, where you know you can’t win but are fighting for a draw.

This is where tactics like perpetual checks, stalemate tricks and position repetitions should pop into your head, and learning to set these up and take advantage of them is a vital part of any chess player’s defensive repertoire.

Study 1: Perpetual check 

Study 2: A Tactical Stalemate

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Study 3: When to Repeat Moves 

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Chapter 9: Forced Draws

Remember, never lose hope in chess! Tactics don’t only serve as potent attacking weapons, but can be the game changers defensively too!

The beautiful thing is that you can use all the offensive-minded tactics you’ll learn in this course to force draws. 

Sacrifices, deflections and attractions can save you many draws.

A Zwischenzug, an in-between move or an intermezzo, is a tactic in which you “throw in” a move, usually a forcing one like a check, capture or attack, before playing the expected and logical move in a line.

These tactics are usually unexpected and can catch your opponents by surprise.

In this chapter, we’ll learn how to implement a zwischenzug, how to combine multiple ones in a chess game, and cover a game by Garry Kasparov that takes advantage of Zwischenzugs in a brilliant manner.

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Study 1: An In-Between Check

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Study 2: Many Zwischenzugs One After The Other

Study 3: Kasparov's Zwischenzugs 

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Study 4: An In-Between Move To Attack

Chapter 10: In-Between Moves

I hope this chapter has brought to light how surprising your opponent in chess with moves like Zwischenzugs can really turn the game into a direction you want it to go in, and put you in the driver’s seat with all the momentum in the world.

Don’t be afraid to try out different in-between move ideas in your own games even if they don’t work, because that’s the best way to learn.

Finally, we’ve reached what’s probably the fanciest and most visually appealing type of tactics: sacrifices!

Sacrifices work well in combination with other tactics, but can easily be a powerful weapon on their own.

It’s not easy to simply give up a piece without a specifically organized plan to follow it up with, so in this chapter we’ll learn when and how you can sacrifice a piece.

Study 1: Greek Gift Sacrifice

Study 2: Sacrifices on h3/h6

Study 3: How to Avoid Overlooking Sacrifices 

Study 4: An Unusual Greek Gift

Chapter 11: Sacrifices

The point of this chapter, and the whole course to be frank, is not only learning tactical patterns and famous tactics like the Greek gift. It’s learning the ideas behind them and creating your own positions in which you can implement sacrifices or tactics like these, and building on these ideas for yourself. Now go out there and sacrifice!

In this chapter, you’ll witness first-hand real chess games sent by our subscribers!

You will learn what sacrifices you can expect to see and find depending on your elo or ranking, and how it’s almost as equally important to locate tactics for your opponents as it is for yourself!

After all, learning tactics in depth is key to your elo skyrocketing.

Study 1: Tactics in Beginner Games

Study 2: Tactics Found at the 800 Level

Study 3: Two 1000s Battle It Out

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Chapter 12: Subscriber Tactics

I’m sure these games posing as realistic examples of what can happen in your own chess games have made this course and the material learned less abstract. Let’s learn how to mix different tactics together in Chapter 13.

Having learned about each tactic in its own individual chapter, it's time to mix them up into one section!

Using your newly acquired knowledge about tactics, Chapter 13 will help you create a mindset that unleashes tactic after tactic in a chess game, sometimes even combining multiple tactics in one single move!

Study 1: Combining Tactical Patterns to Win

Study 2: A Multi-purpose Fork

Study 3: Hybrid Tactics From One of My Classical Games

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Chapter 13: Hybrid Tactics

Having completed this chapter, you are a real tactician. The only thing left for you to do is put these tactics to use, and that’s what you will begin to do in the last chapter of this course. You now have to do as many puzzles as you can and go for these tactics in your own games.

Finally, theory alone can only get you so far, and we all know that practice makes perfect. That’s why Chapter 14 will focus solely on providing 50 drills and 50 quizzes for you to work on and perfect your tactics skills.

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Chapter 14: Bonus Mixed Tactics

I hope this course has helped you delve deep into one of two most important aspects of chess playstyle, which is tactical play. The other one being positional play, of course.
Now it’s time for you to implement what you’ve learned in this course in your own games, both online and in live chess. I’m sure you will notice the improvements extremely quickly!