A pin freezes an enemy piece against something more valuable behind it. In an absolute pin, the piece is stuck in front of its king and literally cannot move. In a relative pin, moving it would lose the queen or a rook — legal, but usually losing. Solve the featured puzzle below, taken from a real game, then train pins at your own level in the trainer.
Pins pay off in two main ways. The direct way: capture the pinned piece with something cheaper, because a frozen defender cannot recapture properly. The patient way: pile up. A pinned piece cannot run, so every new attacker counts double — push a pawn at a pinned knight and watch the defense collapse. The pin glossary entry walks through both mechanisms square by square.
Pins also power other tactics. A pinned pawn does not really defend the square it appears to cover, and combinations constantly walk through those phantom defenses — before you trust a defender, ask whether it is pinned. Only bishops, rooks and queens can pin, which makes pins easy to hunt: scan every line from your long-range pieces through an enemy piece toward the king or queen behind it. The mirror-image tactic, where the valuable piece stands in front instead of behind, is the skewer.
An absolute pin is against the king: moving the pinned piece would expose the king to check, so the move is illegal. A relative pin is against anything else — usually the queen or a rook — so the pinned piece may legally move, it just costs material. Absolute pins are stronger because the frozen piece has no choice at all.
Yes. Even an absolutely pinned piece still attacks its squares — the enemy king may not step onto a square a pinned piece covers, and a pinned piece can even deliver checkmate. What it cannot do is move. Forgetting this rule cuts both ways, so the puzzles here punish it in both directions.
Four standard escapes: block the line with another piece, drive off or capture the pinning piece, move the valuable piece off the line so the pin dissolves, or answer with a bigger threat elsewhere. Good players break pins early — the longer a pin stands, the more attackers pile onto the frozen piece.