Failing to understand a pin from a tactics book

Question

I've began going through, over the board, 1001 Winning Chess Sacrifices and Combinations - 21st century edition. This book is a great supplement to my last question on studying tactics, and I feel like I'm learning a lot from it.

One of the problems I'm having with this particular book is right out of the gate the tactics for pins are very difficult to see in a lot of cases for me. Here is an example, problem 14:

[fen "r4rk1/p2nqppp/Qpp5/3p4/3Pn3/2N1PN2/PP3PPP/2R2RK1 w Qq - 0 1"]

To me one move was clear -

1. Nxd5

This move clears the way for the rook to enter and pin the knight to the queen. It's almost forced to take with the pawn to prevent the queen capture, the queen is on a pretty good square all things considered. Initially I had evaluated:

1. Qb7

But disregarded it as a first move because even though the knight is pinned to the queen

1. ... Rfb8

Mitigates the attack immediately and forces the queen back - or so I thought. By having the rook perform the pin I'd be in better shape to mitigate that attack when I do 2. Qb7.

After:

1. ... Rfb8
2. Nxd5 Rxf7
3. Nxe7+

Which seemed too easy to be right for this tactic and leaves the game at even money, which from what it seems is never the goal of a pin.

So from what I've gathered here I saw the pin at least. The problem I'm suffering from at the moment is how the solution plays out - the solutions don't really give great justification and there's a lot of moves here to consider it "solved":

1. Qb7! Rfc8
2. Nxd5! Qd6
3. Rxc6!!

From this I'm curious

1. Why 1. ...Rfc8 and not Rfb8, attacking the queen?
2. Why does black resign after Rxc6!!?
3. How do I study from this tactic book effectively? I'm getting a ton of them wrong even though I'm seeing the tactic, I'm unable to make the same moves in the tactic for black to make everything "play out right". I'm not sure when to consider a solution "complete".

I'm sorry if this is trivial, I'm working on fixing my over the board play by doing tactics and this book is incredibly difficult. Difficulty is great because its challenging but I'm only on problem 14!

Answer 1

To me one move was clear -

1. Nxd5

But after 1...cxd5 2.Rc7, although the knight is pinned for a move, Black can easily unpin it by moving the queen to d6, d8, e6, or e8. In fact, the knight is not even fully pinned - Black could move it to c5 and force a queen trade. You've sacrificed the knight for a pawn, and get no lasting pin.

Why 1. ...Rfc8 and not Rfb8, attacking the queen?

Well, after 2.Qxc6 Black has lost a pawn. And after that move the d5 pawn is threatened twice and not defended, so Black must play 2...Nxc3 if he wants to have a shot at saving it. But now he's traded off a well-placed knight, and after 3.Rxc3, d5 is isolated and still needs a defender, and White will gain solid control of the c-file and will be up a pawn.

Rfc8 is shown here, not necessarily because it's Black's best move, but because in order to figure out how to proceed against it (and that Qb7 is a good move in the first place), you need to see the pin that Nxd5 exploits. (And if this is based off an actual game, it might be the move actually played in the game.)

Why does black resign after Rxc6!!?

Because he's down two pawns, and White will control the only open file. There's a threat of Ne7+ which limits Black's options in the coming moves.

Answer 2

• Regarding the question - how to deal with very hard tactics?
  

  I'd suggest moving to an easier tactics book, where everything will be clear for you.
  After you will finish that book, move to a more advance book, and you'll find that your tactics abilities are much better.

• Below you can find a couple of possible continues after Rxc6 which shows why black resigned:

[fen "r4rk1/p2nqppp/Qpp5/3p4/3Pn3/2N1PN2/PP3PPP/2R2RK1 w Qq - 0 1"]


1. Qb7! Rfc8
2. Nxd5! Qd6
3. Rxc6!! Qxc6
4. Ne7 Kf8
5. Nxc6

[fen "r4rk1/p2nqppp/Qpp5/3p4/3Pn3/2N1PN2/PP3PPP/2R2RK1 w Qq - 0 1"]


1. Qb7! Rfc8
2. Nxd5! Qd6
3. Rxc6!! Rxc6
4. Qxa8 Nf8    
5. Qxc6 Qxc6
6. Ne7 Kh8
7. Nxc6

Answer 3

I think the key pin in this tactic is not the knight against the queen, but the c-pawn against the rook. If 2...cxd5, 3.Rxc8+ Rxc8 4.Qxc8+, winning the Exchange and a pawn while also keeping the initiative.

That said, 1...Rfc8 is hardly forced. Maybe it was the move played in a real game, like D M said. FWIW, Stockfish suggests it is a mistake (not even in the top five moves!), as it increases White's advantage from +1.5 to +3.0. Still, White can at least gain a pawn with what Stockfish considers best play, for example 1...Qe6 2.Nxe4 dxe4 3.Ng5 Qd5 4.Nxe4.

In the line you originally considered, 1.Nxd5 cxd5 2.Rc7, the problem is that the black knight can unpin itself by attacking the white queen with 2...Nc5! Both the white queen and rook are now under attack; the trade of queens is forced, which leaves White down a knight for a pawn. In other words, the sacrifice made on move 1 was for nothing.

Answer 4

You did well to recognize that Whites advantage has something to do with his control of the c-file and that to make anything out of that he has to open the c-file up. But when you say that one thing was clear, you were wrong, and it should not have taken so long to realize this. I suspect that you were drawn to Nxd5 "because thats the sort of move that you get in tactics books". This would be a very poor way of reasoning in a game. There you might still find Nxd5 tempting, but you would be less surprised that it did not work.

Probably you had another expectation because the position was in a book; you were expecting to gain a large advantage. When you looked at Qc6, either you did not realize the simple threat of Qxc6, or else you thought that was not enough.

It does seem that the solution was not well explained (not everyone has a high opinion of Reinfelds books). If you want to take it easy for a bit, I understand that there are some quite good chess books for kids, although Ive never looked into this.