Detects an active queen (either colour) on an open file or diagonal not under immediate attack, typically in a middlegame tactical position.

By Climbchess Research · 2026-05-08 · 3 min read · Updated May 8, 2026

SAE concept sae_12724 fires when detects an active queen (either colour) on an open file or diagonal not under immediate attack, typically in a middlegame tactical position.. It appears in 9 of 9,950 Climbchess puzzles (0.1%), spanning ELO 1752–2216 (median 1858).

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This page documents Detects an active queen (either colour) on an…, one of 4,505 interpretable chess concepts extracted from Leela Chess Zero via sparse autoencoders. The full feature description from our SAE labelling pipeline reads:

Detects an active queen (either colour) on an open file or diagonal not under immediate attack, typically in a middlegame tactical position.

This pattern fires in 9 of our 9,950 tagged puzzles. The puzzles where it appears span ELO 1752 to 2216, with a median rating of 1858. That distribution tells you whether this is a beginner cue or a master-level subtlety.

Pattern statistics

Related concepts

The five concepts most often co-firing alongside this one (Jaccard similarity over the puzzle co-occurrence graph) are:

• Positions featuring a queen with tactical potential, often in endgames with a… — similarity 0.091
• Central tactical imbalance — an active piece under pressure where the attacker… — similarity 0.041
• A white bishop under attack by at least one black piece, with at least one… — similarity 0.014
• A queen is actively contested — under threat from an enemy piece and relying… — similarity 0.011
• A rook on its starting square (a1 or h1) that is not attacked, with the king… — similarity 0.011

Example puzzles

Below are 9 puzzles spanning the rating distribution. Each links to its own page with full move list and related concepts.

• Puzzle 01uGJ — ELO 1752, themes: advantage, endgame, short, side to move: Black
• Puzzle 01uGJ_F — ELO 1752, themes: advantage, endgame, short, side to move: White
• Puzzle zzaOa_M — ELO 1837, themes: crushing, kingsideAttack, long, side to move: Black
• Puzzle zt8As — ELO 1858, themes: clearance, crushing, fork, side to move: Black
• Puzzle zt8As_F — ELO 1858, themes: clearance, crushing, fork, side to move: White
• Puzzle zt8As_M — ELO 1858, themes: clearance, crushing, fork, side to move: Black
• Puzzle zyJdb — ELO 2216, themes: attraction, crushing, fork, side to move: Black
• Puzzle zyJdb_F — ELO 2216, themes: attraction, crushing, fork, side to move: White
• Puzzle zyJdb_M — ELO 2216, themes: attraction, crushing, fork, side to move: Black

How to use this page

If you want to train this pattern, open the Climbchess trainer and filter for puzzles tagged with this concept. The trainer surfaces them at the right difficulty for your current rating, and tracks how often you spot the cue versus miss it. You can also browse the related concepts above to see neighbouring ideas in feature space.

Climbchess concepts are not heuristics written by a human author. Each one corresponds to a single direction in the residual stream of Leela Chess Zero that activates on a specific board feature, then was labelled by reading the top-activating positions. This makes the catalogue exhaustive (every Leela-detectable pattern is in here somewhere) and falsifiable (you can replay our extraction).