Black has just played h7-h6, threatening White’s knight. What would you play in reply? You know better than to retreat and forfeit the initiative until you have considered offensive play. White has two bishops trained on the king’s position. Search for a pin; if you can find one, it may present tactical opportunities that aren’t obvious on casual inspection. Here we find a pin of the pawn on f7. Next question: what is that pawn supposed to protect that now is unguarded? Don’t just look for loose pieces. Consider loose squares as well. Here the pin weakens e6 and especially g6. Since the square closer to the king is g6 (and e6 remains protected by a different pawn), experiment in your mind’s eye with ways of putting a piece there—preferably your queen, since you are looking first for a mating attack and the queen normally is the best tool for the purpose.

What you discover is that the queen here can’t get to g6 in one move. But it can move to d3 (or b1 or c2—the point is the same); and now if Black plays h6xN—which after all is White’s immediate worry—White can play Qg6 with impunity, taking advantage of the square freed by the pin. How useful would it be to have a queen there? Very: Qxg7 would mate a move later with support from White’s dark-squared bishop, and there is nothing Black would be able to do to prevent it in the meantime. Indeed, 1. Qd3 gives White a forced mate here no matter what Black does. All Black can try are inadequate interpositions. One actual sequence might go: 1. Qd3, Re8; 2. Qg6, Re5 (trying to interpose the rook to cut off the queen’s support from the dark-squared bishop); 3. Qxf7 (instead getting support from the light-squared bishop), Kh8; Qg8# (again, mating with support from the light-squared bishop instead of the other one).

On the second move of the sequence White also has the option of playing Qh7 instead of Qg6, this time giving check with protection from the knight on g5 and still mating in a couple of moves. Yet even then what drives the position still is the pin of the pawn on f7: that is what makes it possible for White’s queen to threaten to move to g6, and that threat is what prevents White’s knight from being taken, leaving it available to protect the queen if it instead moves to h7.

The first thing to take away from this study is how the pin of a pawn in front of your opponent’s king can cause his entire defense to crumble. If you can put a queen on a square that such a pawn was supposed to protect, you may have a mating threat; naturally it depends on the rest of your attacking resources, which is the second point to see: White’s pieces are arrayed against the Black king’s position in devastating fashion. One bishop attacks f7; another attacks g7; the knight attacks h7. The key to mate in a position like this is to get your queen next to the enemy king while giving it protection. Those bishops and the knight give White’s queen lots of ways to do this.