Forks - Learn Chess Tactics (John Nunn) - 1

I started reading "Learn Chess Tactics"  by John Nunn. This book was pitched as a book for players rated between 1200-1400 in a recent Perpetual Chess Podcast with Stejpan Tomi (Hanging Pawns). I don't have any John Nunn books and I thought that this may be a quick read (since I am a 1700 FIDE rated player).

Chapter 1 tackles Forks. While I am well aware of the concept, the actual tactics puzzles at the end of the chapter aren't as simple as one would think, and it definitely feels above the 1200-1400 rating range. 

Regardless of my opinion on the tactics work, there were two real pearls in the Chapter text, that I had never really considered before. 

The first one on directions:

"The two pieces most effective at forking are the queen and the knight. The reason is that the queen and knight can attack in eight directions simultaneously and therefore have better chances of catching enemy pieces in a fork than the rook and bishop, which can only attack in four directions, or the pawn, which is restricted to just two." 

I had never really thought about the directions (not squares) available for each piece to move. Especially that the Knight can move in the same number of directions as the queen! 

The next one is about empty squares:

"It is often harder to see preliminary sacrifices which do not involve a capture (so-called empty-square sacrifices), but they can be just as effective." 

Here Nunn is talking about a sacrifice where a piece lands on an unoccupied but defended square. However, the opponent is unable to take the piece due to a bigger threat. I know of such sacrifices, but didn't know that there was a term for it: empty-square sacrifice.

To illustrate this with an example, consider the following position that I made up (lichess link):

White can play 1. Ne6 forking the Bishop and the rook. Black is unable to move the d4 rook to a square that can defend the g5 bishop.  Black's response 1... fxe6 doesn't work because of 2. Bxe6+ followed by 3. Bxc8. 

Anyway, those were my quick thoughts. Hope it was useful to you. 

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