Overloading

One piece has two jobs. It can only do one.

This is the quietest of the seven motifs, and probably the most common in real games. Nobody deliberately overloads a piece: it happens on its own, as the position tightens.

Black loses a piece not because it was badly defended, but because its defender had something else to do.

How to spot it: when you count the defenders of a square, do not just count how many — look at what each one is doing elsewhere. A busy defender is not a defender.

The threat that makes the overload bite is the back-rank mate: without it, the queen could simply recapture.

Your turn