A skewer is a pin in reverse: you attack a valuable piece, it must move, and you capture the cheaper piece that was hiding behind it. Where a pin freezes the front piece, a skewer chases it away. Solve the featured puzzle below — from a real game — then train skewers at the difficulty that fits you.
A check along a rank, file or diagonal forces the king to step aside — and the rook or queen standing behind it on the same line is lost. King-and-queen skewers along a diagonal are among the most common winning tactics in amateur games, because players park their royalty on the same color complex without noticing. The skewer glossary entry shows the geometry; its frozen twin is the pin.
In rook endings, a rook on the long side skewers king and pawns along ranks; a new queen often survives only because a check skewers the opponent's king against their own queening square. That is why rook endgame technique leans so hard on king position — one careless step onto the wrong line loses everything. Like pins, skewers belong to the line pieces — bishops, rooks and queens — so hunt for them by scanning every line where two enemy pieces stand aligned, the bigger one in front.
Both are straight-line tactics against two aligned pieces — the difference is the order. In a pin the cheaper piece stands in front and is frozen against the valuable one behind it. In a skewer the valuable piece stands in front: it is attacked directly, must move, and surrenders the piece behind it.
Only the line movers — bishops, rooks and queens. Knights, pawns and kings cannot skewer because the tactic depends on attacking through a square toward a second target on the same line. That also tells you where to look: scan the ranks, files and diagonals your long-range pieces can reach.
Very — especially in endgames, where kings walk into open lines and queening races end with a skewer along the last rank. In amateur middlegames the king-and-queen diagonal skewer by a bishop is a constant point scorer. If you train one endgame tactic, skewers along ranks give the fastest return.