Pinned Pieces Don’t Defend—Creative play to exploit them!

I always teach my students that loose pieces are magnets for tactics. Focusing on this concept wins them a lot of games in their rating range (1000-1500 blitz) even when things looked gloom. Of course, loose pieces can spell the doom of players much stronger than myself or my students. Even one of the greatest player of all time Anatoly Karpov lost a game in 12 moves due to hanging loose pieces:

How do you define loose pieces?

In above game, Nh5 and Bd6 are both loose pieces because they were not defended at all. This is how most people would answer the question. While it is true, I think there is a very important thing to recognise. Pieces that are only defended by a piece that is pinned to opponent king are also loose! A piece pinned to opponent king does not actually perform any other tasks due to the pin. Herein lie many tactical and strategic ideas taking advantage of this, and it is often a blind spot in our tactical visions.
This is why I always tell my students to repeat the same mantra over and over before a game: PPDD! (Pinned Pieces don’t defend!). Simply because I think its important to have this actively on our radars. It is very easy to miss these opportunities and you would not believe however many tactical shots lie hidden in otherwise mundane positions.
Lets have a look at below examples (with PPDD in mind!)

Example 1. White to Play and Win. Firstly, what are the opponents undefended pieces?

It was obvious that Ra8 was a loose piece. But did you notice that Ng6 counts as undefended too due to the pin by Bb3? f7 pawn is not a defender of the knight! If you noticed this that’s great, you had PPDD in mind! That’s why the fork Qe4 simply wins on the spot in this otherwise quiet looking position.

Example 2. Black to Play and Win. What are the opponents undefended pieces?

Well done if you noticed that pawn h3 is loose here because Bg2 is not actually defending h3! But moves like Qh5 are not that easy to spot if we don’t have PPDD on our radar. If we took away both bishops in above position, the Qh5 double attack would be much more straightforward. But why is it harder to see with bishops on the board? The pinned “defender” (Bg2) can deceive our minds when we scan the board but in fact it is actually not defending anything. PPDD!

I previously wrote an article on hidden tactics on empty squares. I also want to emphasise that PPDD is not only about pieces; they also don’t defend key squares as we see in the next example. In the following time scramble my opponent and I had a mutual blindness of pinned pieces not defending, both missing the 1 move win here: Can you find it?

Example 3: White to Play and Win.

In this game the g3 checkmate had been on the board for 2 moves but neither of us saw it! As with before, if we took away whites Rc4 and blacks pawn f4, the g3 checkmate should be clear to see. We both missed that blacks f4 pawn actually does not defend the g3 square due to the pin!

Now that we know of the motif, I want to show examples of more advanced and creative play taking advantage of pinned pieces not defending. As you’ll see in the following positions, we can play to lure opponent pieces into PPDD constructions to cancel out any other tasks the pinned would be performing:

Example 4. Black to play and win.

Here we see a great way to use the power of PPDD. Whites queen had everything under control, but we lure it into the Bc6 pin which makes it completely a useless defender for a standard backrank checkmate.

Example 5: White to play and win

Another creative way of taking advantage of PPDD. Ng4 was firmly defended by Bd7, but once the Bishop is lured to Be6 (where it becomes a pinned piece) Ng4 is no longer defended!

The final example is a cool tactical shot from the game Lasker – Aiala, which shows even Kings can be lured into a PPDD construction:

Example 6: White to play and win

The black king is dragged into the Bg5 pin, which cancels out Ne7s defensive task of defending Qc6. Beautiful stuff!

Final Thoughts: Exploit the Pin to Win

Tactics don’t just appear out of nowhere; they come from setting up your opponent for tactical shots learned from your studies and from your opponent overlooking these details. And few assumptions are as costly as thinking a pinned piece (to the king) is actually defending. Mastering tactics is about recognizing hidden threats (such as these PPDD motifs) before your opponent even senses danger. Once you internalize this, you’ll start seeing tactics everywhere.

Enjoyed this article? If you’d like to explore more bite-sized chess lessons, check out my personal blog at chessinprogress.com, where I’m working on a collection of 100 tactical and strategic articles. While some are posted here on Lichess, the majority—along with insights into chess psychology and my own chess journey—can be found exclusively on my blog. Hope to see you there!