A rich tactical position

Being a full time chess coach I'm part of many social groups and come across many different positions and I wanted to share with you this tactically rich example that I've used with my students. I found it enlightening how they came up with different ideas and it will help make that step up from 1-2 move problems to this slightly more complicated example. Enough talk, have a go yourself:

Maybe you found that easy? For a lot of my students this was one of the first things they looked at, they noticed:

1. The white bishop on g2 lines up with the black queen on b7, so moving the white rook gives us a discovered attack (the white rook is also attacked by the black knight)
2. The black rook on b2 is undefended
3. So move the white rook to attack the black rook and we are going to win something!
4. Hence 1.Rb4

But how many of you considered 1. Re2? Maybe you tried that move first? Why does 1.Re2 NOT work?

So my question to the reader is whether you considered this line before making your judgement on position 1? The interesting thing is that 1.Rb4 and 1.Re2 are very similar but naturally I would choose 1.Rb4 because it is defended by a pawn which isn't actually the reason why it is better. 

This excellent defense by black after 1.Re2 doesn't work against 1.Rb4 as the white rook covers the b1 square preventing the intermezzo check, amazing!

Curiously this isn't the only tactical try in the position, maybe you noticed or tried this too...

• 1.Rf4 or 1.Re6?! - with the idea of capturing the knight on f6 - which is recaptured by the king -  and then playing 2.Qd4+ attacking both black king and rook

I really like it if my students try this, it's actually a more complicated tactic than required for the position. The key reason it doesn't work is because of black's same saving move 1...Qd7, getting out of the attack of the bishop and threatening our queen.

So my advice to you is

1. Always look for your opponents best response, in this case a counter threat to our queen.
2. Identify unguarded pieces, not just of your opponent's army but also your own.
3. Look out for those sneaky intermezzo moves, you don't always have to instantly capture back.
4. These intermezzo moves are usually forcing moves, checks, captures or something big threats!

I hope you found this useful, remember to follow me for more content in the future.