Decoy

A decoy forces an enemy piece onto a specific square — not away from a duty, but toward a destination that's dangerous for it. The piece usually has no choice: the move offered is a check it must answer by capturing, or a capture so favorable it would be worse to decline, and the square it lands on turns out to be exactly the square a second attacker was waiting for.

Where decoy points: toward a square, not away from a duty

Deflection and decoy get blurred constantly, but the two mechanisms point in opposite directions. A deflecting sacrifice cares about what a defender stops doing — it removes a guard from a post. A decoy cares about where the target ends up — the square itself is the trap, usually because a fork, a discovered attack, or a mating net is waiting there. Sometimes a single sacrifice does both jobs at once, but the planning process differs: with decoy, you start from a square you want the enemy king or piece standing on, and work out what makes it walk there against its will.

Working backward from the destination

The search for a decoy always starts at the end: pick a square where you already have (or could quickly create) a devastating follow-up — a knight fork, a discovered check, a mating pattern — and ask what piece of the opponent's you'd need standing there to make it work. Only then do you look for a forcing way to put it there. This is backward from how most tactics get found, where you scan outward from your own pieces; decoy starts from the destination and works back toward the sacrifice that gets a piece to it.

Why the sacrifice can look like a blunder

A decoy sacrifice is frequently the kind of move that looks like a mistake if you stop calculating one move too early — giving up a queen for a pawn, on its own, is a losing trade by any normal accounting. The entire point only becomes visible once you count the move that follows the forced capture. Before playing a decoy, the follow-up has to be fully calculated and forced, not just hoped for; a decoy that doesn't actually win anything after the sacrifice is just a blunder that happens to have a nice shape.

What makes a move truly forced

The whole plan depends on the decoyed piece genuinely having no alternative, so it's worth double-checking every other legal option before committing material: can the king step somewhere else instead of capturing, can a different piece block or interpose, is the sacrificed piece actually defended so the capture is unsafe for a different reason. In the position above, the king's other three neighboring squares are all covered before the queen ever lands — that's not incidental, it's the entire reason the sacrifice works.

Decoy shares its core logic with deflection — a target with no good options — and the two are worth studying side by side rather than in isolation, since real combinations frequently use both ideas in the same sequence, one to clear a defender and the other to place the king somewhere specific.