Focusing again on what captures you might make, you see that your bishop attacks Black’s knight and that your queen attacks—and is attacked by—Black’s queen. The pressing issue is that Black is about to play QxQ, as your queen is loose. You could force the exchange of queens first with QxQ (after which Black recaptures NxQ); or you could move your queen or protect it with a pawn. But all this would be unambitious. Consider how you might seize the initiative; in this case, consider in particular what would be needed for you to take Black’s queen at a profit. As we saw, its only guard is the knight. Okay, so take the knight: play BxN, and if Black replies e6xB, you have QxQ. More likely, Black would reply to BxN with QxQ—but then White plays BxQ and still has won a piece.

When you are trying to kick the legs out from under the enemy queen so you can take it for free, you have to be careful; it's a dangerous type of hunt. Generally you will be planning to play QxQ (if you have a lesser piece than your queen aimed at your opponent’s queen, you typically take it without bothering to remove the guard!). But if QxQ is available to you, it also is available to your opponent. You therefore have to find a way to remove the enemy queen’s protection that doesn’t allow him to just reply QxQ and ruin your idea. In the previous frame, we dealt with this by giving check when White captured the queen’s guard; thus there was no time for the enemy to play QxQ. In the current frame we deal with the risk by ensuring that when White captures the queen’s guard he also supplies a defender for his own queen. The result is that when White recaptures after Black's QxQ, he takes his bishop out of range of the pawn on e6. If that weren't so, the sequence here wouldn't work.