Decoy Chess Puzzles
Free decoy chess puzzles. Practice sacrificing a piece to lure the king or another piece to a fatal square. Free to practise, graded easy to hard, no login required.
About decoy puzzles
A decoy lures a piece — usually the king — onto a square where it can be attacked, typically by offering material it is obliged to take. It is the mirror image of deflection: instead of pulling a defender away from something, you drag a target towards you. Decoys are the engine behind most forced mating sequences, because forcing the king onto a specific square is how mating nets are built. These puzzles train the habit of asking what would happen if the enemy king stood one square further forward, which is the question that reveals combinations.
How to train decoy
A decoy is a shape, not a sequence. Once you can spot the shape you will find the move in seconds instead of calculating from scratch, so train for recognition speed: glance, name the pattern, then verify.
Questions
How many decoy puzzles are there?
Enough that you will not repeat them — this set is drawn from a library of over 1,000,000 puzzles taken from real games, graded from easy to hard.
What level is this suitable for?
Children from about age 5 upward, once they know how the pieces move, through to rated tournament players. Start on the easy set and move up when you are solving most of them at a glance.